Native Myth-Buster: Alum, Scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN -- In the early 1960s, she studied at San Francisco State College, eventually earning a Ph.D. in history from UCLA in 1974. Dunbar-Ortiz played a foundational role in the late-’60s women’s liberation movement, both through her activism and her political journal No More Fun and Games: A Journal of Female Liberation. Throughout the 1970s, she made alliances with the African National Congress, the civil rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society and the American Indian Movement. During the 1980s, she spent months-long stints in northeastern Nicaragua, living with the Miskitu, an indigenous tribal people, as they fought against Contra mercenaries, many of them trained by the CIA. She recounted this epoch of her life in “Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War” (2005).