The Fate of Dying Empires: An Interview with Historian and Activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
Recently, I’ve been in the habit of getting together for coffee and conversations with author and activist, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, though I have known about her and have read her impassioned scholarship for years. In person, and at the age of 87, she tends to be soft-spoken, albeit keenly aware of her surroundings, whether on the street, a neighborhood or a cafe. In some ways, Roxanne was an outlier in the Sixties – she wasn’t born to a military clan, or an Old Left family, but she was in the thick of the protests and the anti-war and feminist movements that erupted in the Vietnam era. On her birth certificate, she is ‘Roxy,” though her father insisted he named her “Roxey. She disliked the name, whatever spelling. When she moved to San Francisco, and got to know some of the Beat poets and writers, they called her “Roxanne,” after the Roxanne of Cyrano de Bergerac, and it stuck. The name Dunbar comes from her paternal grandfather; the name Ortiz from her former husband, Simon, an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Acoma. She has a grown daughter with whom she is close.
For much of her life, Roxanne has been a historian and the author of several widely read and influential books about Indians, guns, violence, genocide, resistance and more. They are: Indigenous Peoples’ History of the US; Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment; Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, A History of Erasure and Exclusion. Indigenous Peoples’ History of the US has just been published in a “graphic interpretation,” by Paul Peart-Smith edited by Paul Buhle with Dylan Davis and put in print by Beacon Press, her “go-to publishers.”
Dunbar-Ortiz has written three memoirs that deftly weave together the personal and the political, public and private worlds: Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (Verso and the University of Oklahoma Press); Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–75 (City Lights Books); and Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, (University of Oklahoma Press.) After I read Outlaw Woman, I told Roxanne that she didn’t seem to be a real American outlaw in the mold of Bonnie and Clyde or Pretty Boy Floyd and Annie Oakley. “The title reflects more of what I wanted to be than who I actually was,” she said. Still, one might call her a maverick when it comes to scholarship. She rejects accepted wisdom. Roxanne and I gather for coffee at Caffe Trieste in North Beach or at an unpretentious place on Polk Street near her home on Russian Hill; we’ve eaten together and I’ve learned that she’s a vegetarian. The shelves in her apartment are lined with books. With readers of CounterPunch in mind – Dunbar-Ortiz reads it daily— I emailed her twelve questions. She wrote back her answers; here they are, edited for brevity.
Q: Is this a unique period in American history? Does it have precedents? Does the more things change the more they remain the same?
A: I think it is a unique period in US history, a sort of end time, the US, the wealthiest and most powerful nation state experiencing the fate of dying empires turning inward fomenting civil divisions and disturbances, while the wealth gap has produced a trillionaire cabal. Capitalism unrestrained can and seems to be nurturing a form of nationalism that tends toward fascism that is always a component of capitalism.
The United States was founded on genocide of the Indigenous to take the continent and great wealth achieved by land sales and enslaved labor, creating an order of white supremacy. As freedom struggles have gained some restitution and equality, fortified by post 1950s immigrations of people from all over the world, liberals hailing the idea of “a nation of immigrants,” the white backlash brought us Trump and Trumpism, the systematic unraveling of laws and practices that favor equality, a chilling future.
Q: How does now compare with the Red Scares of the past we’ve had?
A: Well, it’s not come to the point of executions as with the Rosenbergs in the 1950s, but it does feel like a coming civil war. Although adhering to socialism or communism is more tolerated today—they’re sort of used as cuss words—the big scare now on the right is immigration, transphobia, women’s rights, all particularly attacked by right wing Christian Nationalists who have the support of the US President.
Red Scares of the past involved a supposed foreign enemy that was said to have infiltrated the population, as imagined in the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with McCarthyism raising the horror of subversives among us, and paranoia brilliantly exposed by Richard Hofstadter in his 1964 book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
I recall a large map in our rural school in Oklahoma that featured a flood of red, indicating communism, pouring over the North Pole, reaching the northern border of the US. Now, Trumpism is sort of like a cartoon version to scare the population into paranoia, even calling Democrats “communists.” It resonates with some older white people who remember the era as I do, but I don’t think it’s working that well. Still, Christian evangelicals are opportunistically predicting end times, Trump as the savior, and Charlie Kirk as a martyr. White nationalism and White Christian nationalism have replaced the Red Scare.
Q: How does the history of your own family of origin provide you with insights into American culture and society?
A: I grew up in a small rural county in central Oklahoma, fourth child of a landless farming family who were sharecroppers. My paternal grandfather, Emmett Dunbar, had moved the family from rural Missouri in 1907, the year of Oklahoma statehood, and the year my father was born. My grandfather was a large-animal veterinarian and also owned land that he farmed. He joined the Socialist Party and was elected, on the Socialist Party ticket as County Commissioner of the county.
In that period, Socialists were surging, not only in Chicago and other cities, but also in a number of rural towns and counties in Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, and Texas. My grandfather named my father Moyer Haywood Scarberry Pettibone Dunbar after the leaders of the Socialist Party who were on trial for sedition. President Woodrow Wilson launched a war against the Socialist Party—William D. Haywood, George A. Pettibone, Charles H. Moyer—including re-organizing the KKK to attack Catholics and Socialists.
My grandfather died before I was born, but my father told me stories about my brave grandfather, although my father became a racist and a conservative in the 1950s, convinced by McCarthyism. Knowing those stories of my valiant socialist grandfather drove me to be a left wing activist who called myself a revolutionary in the 1960s, pretty much estranged from most of my family and community, moving to San Francisco.
At San Francisco State (then college, now university), I felt like an outsider on the white left, that seemed to hate poor white and working class people. When the Black Power movement kicked out the white organizers, telling them to organize white people, they balked. One of my mentors, the late Anne Braden, was concerned about the problem facing white organizers who had worked in the South for the freedom rides and voter registration drives in Black communities. Braden said, “they just don’t like white people. You can’t organize people if you don’t like them.”
Q: Why are you writing now about white nationalism, other than the fact that your editor asked you to do it? What do you hope to accomplish or reveal or show us?
A: I’m writing a book of essays on white nationalism, but also white Christian nationalism, which we saw on display with the funeral service for the white Christian youth evangelist, Charlie Kirk. I grew up religious with a devoted and active Southern Baptist mother, filled with the fiery words of traveling evangelicals and stadium sermons by Billy Graham, and radio evangelists. I’m bringing my own stories into the essays. Most of the people who have backgrounds like mine don’t go to college or become professors as I did. I did go to college and lost my religion there when I took a required course in physical anthropology, where I learned that the Christian Bible was poetry, not history. In my rural school, like others in the US, some even now, especially homeschoolers, are told the Bible is the gospel.
Q: Is the American Civil War, when white men slaughtered other white men, an aberration given that white men have historically slaughtered people of color?
A: It was an aberration. Why Reconstruction failed, with the former Confederacy implementing Jim Crow totalitarian segregation for nearly another century, is rarely convincingly explained. The elephant in the room of the query is an absence of historical narrative, including that of the great Black writer, W. E. B. Du Bois.
The Army in the decades leading up to the Civil War was divided into seven departments, all engaged in counterinsurgency against indigenous nations and a two-year war against Mexico, seizing the northern half. After the end of the Civil War, the Union Army was repositioned in the Southeast to help implement the political empowerment of the formerly enslaved Black people, now US citizens.
By 1870, six of the seven war departments, comprising 183 companies, had been transferred west of the Mississippi; a colonial army fighting the native nations and seizing their land. That left only one department to occupy the defeated Confederate states and to enforce freedom and equality. In the Spring of 1877, federal troops were withdrawn and sent west, marking the end of Reconstruction and the implementation of forced segregation.
Q: You have actual experience with guns. How has that helped you frame/understand our gun crazy society?
A: I tried to understand US gun craziness while researching and writing my 2018 book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. I grew up with guns that my father and brothers owned; shotguns and .22 rifles for hunting, but never for protection as most gun hoarders claim they need. I doubt they were even aware of the Second Amendment. It’s a tricky and much debated amendment: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
The National Rifle Association and its constituency argue that the Second Amendment guarantees the right for every individual to bear arms, while gun-control advocates maintain that the Second Amendment is about states continuing to have their own militias. They emphasize the language of “well regulated.” State militias, later called the National Guard, were already provided for in the Constitution.
Capitalism and white racial panic have much to do with the proliferations of guns in the US. Guns, like gold and silver, are shiny objects that give the sense of power especially to men. I had that experience with guns during the late Sixties and early Seventies as we formed liberation groups and thought we needed guns for self-defense. But, guns are not really for self-defense, because you have to shoot first. US people feel vulnerable and powerless and think a firearm can protect them.
Q: What did you mean when you called your book, “Not a Nation of Immigrants?” Was that in response to something, or some idea? After all, people have come to our shores from China, Russia, Peru, Scotland, England, India, Japan, Ghana, Brazil and….
A: Declaring the US a “Nation of Immigrants,” is a liberal dodge to not acknowledge genocidal settler-colonialism and the brutal land theft of indigenous nations that created the richest country in the world. Immigration laws did not exist until the continent was fully conquered. Only, with the full development of industrial capitalism were workers recruited from Scandinavia and Eastern and Southern Europe and Mexico to work in the factories and fields. Anglos and Scots were early settlers. German immigrants came next and brought socialism.
Q: The term “settler colonialism” seems to be getting traction right now more than ever before. Why is that?
A: Yes, it’s been an important concept to academics and students to understand power relations in the world, along with whiteness as power. As the late Patrick Wolfe emphasized in his groundbreaking research, settler colonialism is a structure, not an event.
Wolfe was an Australian anthropologist and historian, one of the initial theorists and historians of settler colonialism. He researched, wrote, taught, and lectured internationally on race, colonialism, Indigenous peoples’ and Palestinian histories, imperialism, genocide, and critical history of anthropology. He was also a human rights activist who used his scholarship and voice to support the rights of oppressed peoples.
In the United States, settler colonialism was more than a colonial structure that developed and replicated itself over time in the 170 years of British colonization in North America and preceding the founding of the United States. The founders were not an oppressed, colonized people. They were British citizens being restrained by the monarch from expanding the thirteen colonies to enrich themselves. They were imperialists who visualized the conquest of the continent and gain access to the Pacific and China. Achieving that goal required land, wealth, and settler participation.
Q; You live in and write in San Francisco. How does this place inform and shape the ways you see the world and the USA?
A: I don’t think that living in San Francisco informs me or shapes how I see the world and the USA, but I love San Francisco. It’s a safe haven. I first moved here from Oklahoma when I was 21, but have lived in many different places—Los Angeles, Mexico, Boston, New Orleans, Houston, New Mexico, New York—finally settling in San Francisco in 1977.
I conceive of San Francisco as a city-state, sort of separated from the rest of the country. There are people from all over the world who live here, and I love living near the Chinese community, a people so ostracized and abused, and now thriving.
San Francisco is a kind of world in itself. I would rather live in New York, but I tried that for a year, and it was too fast-paced for me. I like to visit and have many friends there. I feel safe living alone in San Francisco, walking, and riding public transportation. I like the sense of being on the edge of the continent, love the ocean, a kind of freedom that is precious and that I never tire of. It was the first twenty-one years of my life growing up poor in rural Oklahoma that formed the way I see the world and the USA, my identification and support of the poor and working class.
Q: Are you an ist of some kind, anarchist, internationalist, communist, feminist? Why so? If not, then why not?
A: I was first a child of rural poor white Christian people. I wanted nothing more than to grow up and move to a city, which I did at age 16. It was Red Scare time, but I seemed to attract left-wing mentors when I graduated and enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, which the majority of right-wing Oklahomans called a hotbed of communism.
I met left-wing and foreign students, including a Palestinian who taught me about colonialism, then married into a liberal trade union family. It was the beginning of the era of decolonization, which thrilled me. At eighteen, I began reading James Baldwin and other critics of racism, capitalism and imperialism. Moving to San Francisco, I finished college at San Francisco State during the time of the Du Bois Club, the youth group of the Communist Party, that was active on campuses, many members traveling to the South to support the desegregation movement.
I admired them, but did not get invited to join them. The highlight for me at that time was Malcolm X speaking at San Francisco State, and again at the University of California at Berkeley during my first year of graduate school. I transferred to UCLA and majored in history in the mid-1960s, and became active in the antiwar movement.
I was one of the founders of the surge of the women’s liberation movement, becoming a full-time organizer in the late 1960s and early 70s. Our feminist movement changed the world and I am proud to have contributed to that. I’ve done international human rights work since 1977, mostly meeting at UN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. I lived there for a year, and until the pandemic traveled there at least twice a year for meetings and conferences. I guess I would call myself an anti-colonial, anti-racist socialist-feminist.
Q. Are there members of the Sixties generation you regard as heroes and heroic?
A: Of course, we were all flawed, but I greatly admire so many comrades from the Sixties generation, including yourself, some that I knew and worked with, but mostly from afar. Above all, I idolized Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. There was the heroic Palestinian, Leila Khaled, who I actually got to meet when I attended the UN Conference on Women in Copenhagen in 1980. I admired Amilcar Cabral, who founded and led the The African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) that ousted the Portuguese colonizers. Angela Davis was hired to teach at UCLA when I was a graduate student there, the beginning of her persecution and prosecution, activating multi-racial and feminist organizing and protests. She was and is a great hero to me and many around the world.
Q: What about other generations? Do they offer icons of revolt and revolution?
A: Individuals and communities that are oppressed or exploited find ways to resist and often gain power, however harsh the conditions. As a historian, I have focused on oppression and resistance, particularly against European and US colonization and imperialism. Enslaved African resistance in the US is mind-boggling. In such a closed capitalist system, like no other, they resisted, from small gestures, such as wrecking tools and slow downs, to escaping and forming resistant communities: the 1739 Stone rebellion, Gabriel’s Rebellion in 1800, the German Coast Uprising (1811), Denmark Vesey’s Conspiracy (1822), Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831), and above all John Brown’s rebellion. Imagine ”weird” John Brown leading a rebellion! Novelist Herman Melville called him “The meteor of the war.”
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