Born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1938[3] to an Oklahoma family, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in Central Oklahoma. Her father was a sharecropperofScots-Irish ancestry. Dunbar claims her mother was of Cherokee descent.[1] Dunbar-Ortiz initially self-identified as having Cheyenne ancestry, but she subsequently acknowledged that she is white.[4] She has since claimed to be of Cherokee descent,[4] and that her mother denied her Native ancestry after marrying into a white family.[5] Because of her various claims of having Indigenous ancestry, Dunbar acknowledged that she has been "denounced as a fraud for pretending to be Native American."[6]
Dunbar's paternal grandfather was a settler, landed farmer, veterinarian, labor activist, and member Socialist Party in Oklahoma and the Industrial Workers of the World. Her father, Moyer Haywood Pettibone Scarberry Dunbar, was named after the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, "Big" Bill Haywood. Her father's stories of her grandfather inspired her to lifelong social justice activism.[7] Her account of life up to leaving Oklahoma is recorded in the book Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie.
Married at 18, Dunbar-Ortiz and her husband moved to San Francisco three years later, where she has lived most of the years since. This marriage later ended. She has a daughter, Michelle. She later married writer Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo).[8]
From 1967 to 1974, she was a full-time activist living in various parts of the United States, traveling to Europe, Mexico, and Cuba. She was also involved in the women's liberation movement. Outlaw Woman: Memoir of the War Years outlines this time of her life, chronicling the years 1960–1975.
In 1968 she founded Cell 16, which was a feminist organization in the United States known for its program of celibacy, separation from men and self-defense training (specifically karate); it has been cited as the first organization to advance the concept of separatist feminism.[9][10][11]
She edited the book The Great Sioux Nation, which was published in 1977 and presented as the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indians of the Americas, held at United Nations' headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. The book was issued in a new edition by University of Nebraska Press in 2013. The Great Sioux Nation was followed by two other books: Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico (1980) and Indians of the Americas: Human Rights and Self-Determination (1984). She also edited two anthologies on Native American economic development while heading the Institute for Native American Development at the University of New Mexico.
In 1981, Dunbar-Ortiz was asked to visit SandinistaNicaragua to appraise the land tenure situation of the Miskito Indians in the northeastern region of the country. Her two trips there that year coincided with the beginning of United States government's sponsorship of a proxy war to overthrow the Sandinistas, with the northeastern region on the border with Honduras becoming a war zone and the basis for extensive propaganda carried out by the Reagan administration against the Sandinistas. In over a hundred trips to Nicaragua and Honduras from 1981 to 1989, she monitored what was called the Contra War. She tells of these years in Caught in the Crossfire: The Miskitu Indians of Nicaragua (1985) and Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War (2005).[13][14]
In her work An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz condemns the Discovery Doctrine and the settler colonialism that devastated Native American populations in the United States. She compares this form of religious bigotry to the modern-day conquests of al-Qaeda.[15] She states that, since much of the current land within the United States was taken by aggression and oppression, "Native peoples have vast claims to reparations and restitution," yet "[n]o monetary amount can compensate for lands illegally seized, particularly those sacred lands necessary for Indigenous peoples to regain social coherence."[15]
Roots of Resistance: Land Tenure in New Mexico, 1680–1980. University of California, 1980; new edition, University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. ISBN9780806138336, OCLC82473104
Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie. Verso, 1997; new edition, University of Oklahoma Press, 2006. ISBN9780806137759, OCLC907147398
Indigenous Peoples: A Global Quest for Justice. (ed.) A Report for the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues, Geneva. Zed Press, 1987.
La Cuestión Mískita en la Revolución Nicaragüense. Editorial Linea, 1986.
Indians of the Americas: Human Rights and Self-Determination. Zed Press; Praeger, 1984. ISBN9780030009143, OCLC393606660
Native American Energy Resources and Development. (ed.) Albuquerque: Institute for Native American Development (INAD), University of New Mexico, 1980. ISBN9780934090025, OCLC7584489
Economic Development in American Indian Reservations. (ed.) INAD, University of New Mexico, 1979.
^Fahs, Breanne (2018). Firebrand Feminism: The Radical Lives of Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Dana Densmore. Seattle: University of Washington Press. p. 22.
