Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, activist, writer, educator extraordinaire

DICK BANCROFT
Ted Means, Pat Bellanger, and Bill Wahpepah standing at the podium where speeches and over a hundred testimonies of abuse and exploitation were given at the 1977 UN Geneva Conference.

Roxanne was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1939 and 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 member in Socialist Party and 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, she and her husband moved to San Francisco three years later, 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.

Graduated from San Francisco State College 1963, B.A. History. History Doctorate degree from University of California, Los Angeles 1974; 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.… Read the rest “Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, activist, writer, educator extraordinaire”