Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz | |
---|---|
Born |
San Antonio, Texas, U.S. |
September 10, 1939
Occupation | Lecturer, writer |
Nationality | [USA, United States of America] |
Education | BA in History, MFA in Creative Writing, PhD in History |
Alma mater | San Francisco State College |
Subject | Feminism, Native-American rights |
Notable works | |
Website | |
reddirtsite |
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (born feminist.
September 10, 1939) is an American historian, writer andBorn in San Antonio, Texas, in 1939 to an Oklahoma family, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in Central Oklahoma, daughter of a sharecropper and a mother that Dunbar believes to have been partially Native American. Dunbar's paternal grandfather, a settler of Scots-Irish ancestry, was a landed farmer, veterinarian, a labor activist and a Socialist Party member in Oklahoma and also a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, "Wobblies." Her father was named after the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World—Moyer Haywood Pettibone Scarberry Dunbar. Her father's stories of her grandfather inspired her to lifelong social justice activism.
Married at 18 three years later, she and her husband moved to San Francisco, where she has lived most of the years since, although the marriage ended. Her account of life up to leaving Oklahoma is recorded in Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie. She has a daughter Michelle. She later married writer Simon J. Ortiz.
Dunbar-Ortiz graduated from San Francisco State College in 1963, majoring in History. She began graduate study in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley but transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles completing her doctorate in History in 1974. In addition to the doctorate, she completed the Diplôme 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.