An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Dunbar-Ortiz is a historian, activist, and teacher. She was born in 1939 in San Antonio, Texas, but grew up in rural Oklahoma in a poor, sharecropper family. Her mother was “part Indian, most likely Cherokee” and her father was a tenant farmer of “Scots-Irish settler heritage” (xi). She grew up in a time when there was rigid segregation among Black, white, and Indigenous parts of the town or schools and due to her mother being ashamed of her Indigenous ancestry, Dunbar-Ortiz rarely interacted with Indigenous people or communities near where she lived.

She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1974 and taught at the Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward when it was established. There, she also aided in founding the Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies departments. She is now a Professor Emerita of the Ethnic Studies department at California State University, Hayward. Although she is best known for her book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, she is also the author of several other works covering topics such as Indigenous culture and history, feminism and women’s liberation, and the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Her works include All the Real Indians Died Off, The Great Sioux Nation, and most recently, Not a “Nation of Immigrants”:

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