Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz quotes
(Thanksgiving has) never been about honoring Native Americans. It's been about the origin story of the United States, the beginning of genocide, dispossession and constant warfare from that time-actually, from 1607 in Jamestown-until the present. It's a colonial system that was set up.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
I never thought I would see it, you know, in the 1960s or '70s. It didn't seem like there would ever be any questioning of the role of Columbus. But it will be a long struggle still. It's just not appropriate to celebrate Columbus and Indigenous peoples on the same day. It's a contradiction. One is a genocidal enslavement, is what Columbus represents. And the situation of Native people today, still under colonialism, with shrunken land bases and not true sovereignty, is the fruit of that beginning, and they're completely contradictory.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Thanks to the inspiration of Elizabeth Martinez, who founded and published El Grito del Norte in Española, New Mexico, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, I decided to write my doctoral dissertation on the history of land tenure in northern New Mexico. Only through understanding history and land, I believed, could the present be understood.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
U.S. activists are always enthusiastic about and do solidarity work for agrarian uprisings in Latin America, such as the Zapatistas and the previous national liberation movements that had agrarian reform/revolution as their bases. But, they have not taken the time and made the commitment to understand indigenous and other agrarian struggles in the United States. Even the Civil Rights Movement in the South was weakened by not taking up the issue of land, and when voting rights were achieved organizers fled north and west to work in urban areas.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Photo:
Thomas Good,
CC BY-SA 4.0
Occupation: American Historian
Born: September 10, 1938
Quotes count: 5
Wikipedia: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Related authors
