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........

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