Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Roxanne Dunbar) was born on September 10th, 1938 and is currently 87 years old. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was born in San Antonio, TX, USA. Dunbar-Ortiz attended San Francisco State University where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree, Mills College where she received a Master of Fine Arts degree and the University of California, Los Angeles where she received a PhD.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is an American writer, historian, and activist that is based in San Francisco. Originally born in Texas, and grew up in Oklahoma, she is a social justice and feminist activist.

In 1963, she graduated from San Francisco State College, majoring in history. She started graduate study in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley however transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles finishing up her doctorate in the field of history in 1974. Along with the doctorate, she finished the Diplome of the International Law of Human Rights at the International Institute of Human Rights, Strasbourg, France in 1983 and an MFA in creative writing at Mills College in 1993.

She was a full time activist living in various parts of the United States from 1967 to 1974, traveling to Cuba, Mexico, and Europe. Also she was involved in the women’s liberation movement.

She founded a feminist organization in the US, called Cell 16, which was known for its program of celibacy, separation from men, and self defense training. It’s been cited as the first organization to advance the concept of separatist feminism.

Roxanne is Professor Emerita at California State University, Hayward. Since she retired from university teaching, she’s been lecturing widely and still continues to write.

Roxanne was awarded the Cultural Freedom Award from the Lannan Foundation for the achievements of her lifetime of tireless work.

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is the first history of the United States being told from the indigenous peoples’ perspective.

Today in the US, there are over 500 federally recognized Indigenous nations that comprise almost 3 million people, descendants of the 15 million Native people that once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has primarily been omitted from history. Now, for the very first time, Roxanne offers a history of the US told from the Indigenous peoples’ point of view and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.

She adroitly challenges the founding myth of the US and illustrates how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, either displacing or eliminating them.

And as she reveals, this policy was praised in pop culture, through writers such as Walt Whitman, and James Fenimore Cooper, and in the military and the highest offices of government.

Spanning over 400 years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences which have haunted our national narrative.

Related Authors

Fans of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz also enjoy these authors:

1. R.F. Kuang, author of The Poppy War Series.
2. Andy Weir, author of: Project Hail Mary.
3. V.E. Schwab, author of: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
4. Madeline Miller, author of: Circe.
5. T.J. Klune, author of The House in the Cerulean Sea Series.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: F.A.Q