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Southwest
Flair Q & A with author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
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Southwest Flair:
What key elements helped a poor girl from
Oklahoma end up as a Professor Emeritus of
Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies at California
State University? Was there one defining moment
that changed the course of your life?
Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz: Two individuals turned me on
to that path. One was my oldest brother, 11
years older than me, who left home right after
graduating from our small, rural high school,
hitchhiked to Los Angeles, worked full time, and
enrolled in one of the state's free community
colleges. This was the first time that anyone
in our family on either side had gone to
college, other than my grandfather and an uncle
who were veterinarians, who in those days could
go to a specialized vet college without a
bachelor's degree. I was only 6 years old when
my brother went off, but everyone was so proud
of him. He finished the two year program, then
was drafted, but after military service, he
finished his degree at University of
California. Everytime he came home to visit and
in letters, he told me about the wonders of
studying and of a college education and urged me
to commit myself to it.
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The other
person was a teacher in my junior year of high school,
Dr. Sylvia Mariner. She was a widow, a Californian who
had married an Oklahoman in Los Angeles, and after his
death, she came to take over his family's home outside
the rural community where we lived. She was already in
her late 60s, but decided to teach high school English
at our school. It was not so much her teaching that
influenced me, rather the fact that she had a doctorate
in Philosophy, a Ph.D. I didn't understand for years
that her doctorate was actually in English literature,
and exactly what a Ph.D. was, but it became a goal of
mine to attain one. I never knew before that such a
thing existed. She also had thousands of books. By the
time she came, I had already read all the books in our
tiny school library, so this was a treasure trove. She
actually taught me by giving me books to read. She was
a political leftist, and it was the McCarthy era, but
she was able to instill in me pride in my rural roots
and to understand poverty, racism, and discrimination
against women.
Southwest
Flair:
Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in
New
Mexico
has just been updated and released. What is it that
makes "Roots of Resistance" just as timely and important
today as when you first wrote it, and what inspired or
moved you to take on this subject initially?
Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz:
Unfortunately, all the historical and contemporary
problems as of 1980 when the book was first published
have mostly grown worse. The natural resource base has
shrunk, and water rights are unresolved. Historical
antagonism between the Hispanic and Pueblo Indian
communities have sharpened while Anglo-American
corporate dominance has increased. I took on the
subject initially in 1969, two years after the Tierra
Amarilla courthouse raid that brought to the world's
attention the unresolved land grant situation in New
Mexico. At the time, I met and spoke with only Hispanic
land grantees, their lawyers, and supporters.
Four years later when I decided to do my history
doctoral dissertation on the history of land tenure in
New Mexico, I learned about the Pueblo Indian land and
resource issues. Most books and articles on the subject
deal either with the Pueblo Indians or the Hispanics.
Roots of Resistance deals with both.
Southwest
Flair:
Would you give us a brief history of land ownership in
northern New Mexico, for those unfamiliar with our
states formation and land issues?
Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz: The
colonization of New Mexico in 1598 was accomplished with
a few hundred men and their families and servants. The
conquistadores were Iberians born in Mexico; the
servants were mulatos descended from African slaves and
mestizos as well as Nahuatl-speaking Mexicans. The
colonizers were soldiers and friars. The mission of
colonization was aimed at the dual goal of enhancing and
enriching the Spanish state and church as well as
satisfying the personal ambitions of the colonizers. The
seventeenth-century colony was parasitic economically,
drawing its livelihood from Pueblo labor and captive
Indian slaves. Spanish colonial institutions were
applied, and the soldier-encomendero became lord over
his assigned Pueblo vassals, while the friars struggled
for control of Pueblo souls, supplies, and labor. A
power play, competition over Pueblo labor and time,
developed, splitting the colonists into antagonistic
factions. Spanish governors came and went. Each acquired
whatever wealth he could eke out of the hundreds of
captives working in sweatshops and through sharp trading
practices with Indian traders as well as slave traffic.
The situation was not unusual in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries of Spanish colonial experience in
America, but it was aggravated in New Mexico by the lack
of mineral wealth available for extraction.
Settlers
established estancias, which may have been similar to
those of the interior of Mexico, about which more is
known. They settled along the river, encroaching on
Pueblo lands. The Pueblo revolt brought the colony to a
quick end in 1680. Some years, at least twenty, of
organization produced a unified offensive on the part of
all but a few southern Pueblos and included the Hopis
and Zunis to the west as well as Apache, Navajo, and Ute
allies. Many low-caste people--mulatos, mestizos, and
Indian servants--joined the revolt. The settlers were
driven into exile to El Paso. Recolonization took
thirteen years to accomplish. The
results of the eighty-year colonial rule were chaos and
damage to Pueblo agriculture and society. A shrinkage of
the Pueblo domain in actual number of villages and
population resulted. Some Pueblo villages were abandoned
and never reoccupied. Many Pueblos went to live with the
Apaches and the Navajos in the mountains and on the
plains.
The type
of land tenure developed by the colonists during the
first period of colonial rule cannot be documented
because all records were destroyed in the revolt and
none have been found in colonial archives that would
indicate the land-tenure patterns of the colonists.
Colonial laws and institutions provided for integrity of
Indigenous villages and land tenure, and although these
were apparently honored in a legalistic manner, they
were breached in practice.
Spanish
recolonization was debated as to its rationale and
possibility. Spanish authorities, alarmed by French
expansion to Spain’s northern and eastern frontiers in
North America, determined that the northern frontier
should be maintained for the defense of the wealthy
mines of the interior. In order to maintain a colony it
was necessary to quiet Indian resistance to their
presence.
The eight
hundred colonists recruited for the 1692 recolonization
were a collection of soldiers, friars, Spanish born in
Mexico from the central valley, settlers from Zacatecas,
and many of the families who had been expelled from the
earlier colony. None joined the colonization venture
with a view of gaining wealth because the lack of
affluence in the Río Grande area was well known.
Settlers who were prepared to farm, raise livestock, and
support themselves, then, reestablished the colony. A
number of the original families from the previous colony
and a few from the new group came to be the political
and social elite of the society that developed. They
built their haciendas principally in the Río Abajo area.
The local political authorities, the alcaldes mayores,
were invariably drawn from the few influential families.
During
the entire remainder of Spanish rule, the principal
concern of the colonists was surrounding Indian
resistance to their presence. Military expeditions to
punish Indian communities for alleged raids and attacks
on Spanish settlements as well as expeditions with
little pretext except to acquire booty and captives were
frequent. Pueblo Indian and other Indian soldiers were
impressed into the colonial military and composed the
majority of its forces.
A large
population of Indians, along with mestizos and mulatos,
who had been separated from their communities lived in
the barrio of Santa Fe called Analco. Colonial officials
conceived a policy of settling these people, generally
referred to as genízaros, on the frontier of the colony,
granting them land in return for their building of
fortified villages and serving in the frontier militia.
By the end of the eighteenth century, these settlements
dotted the northern frontier of the colony. The settlers
subsisted by agriculture, trade, raising flocks, and
acquisition of war booty. Colonial officials pressured
the settlers to build their homes around plazas, forming
fortified villages, which also provided them protection
against attack, a policy counter to the settlers’
tendencies to establish small ranchos near their fields
or flocks.
The
community land grants to genízaros and other needy
settlers and the concentrated village settlement pattern
not only expanded the land base of the colonial regime
and held the frontier against Indian pressure but also
produced a particular pattern of land tenure and
socioeconomic relations. The lowly and landless became
independent farmers, albeit generally very poor, and
settled in communities sharing common pasture land and
water. The villagers developed social relations based,
economically, on irrigation agriculture, sheep-raising,
and trade with neighboring Indian communities. The
settlements, largely in the Río Arriba area, produced a
distinctive land-tenure pattern in the north that
contrasted with the more dominant hacienda settlement
pattern of the Río Abajo.
Pueblo
Indian population declined in the eighteenth century,
partially due to epidemics but also to outward
migration. The Pueblo practice of expulsion of
dissidents or dissidents choosing to leave the community
was a factor in the retention of Pueblo social integrity
and strength. Those who left their communities could not
build a new Pueblo as they had done in the past; rather,
they fell into the genízaro caste. Despite repeated
encroachments on Pueblo lands, Pueblo landholdings and
land tenure were not radically altered in the eighteenth
century. Pueblos developed a dualistic structure of
Spanish institutional forms and continued to practice
their own ceremonies secretly. Through exterior
institutions, aided by their Spanish colonial advocates,
they employed their right to petition, to fight
encroachments, nearly always with some success.
Community grant lands rarely came close to any Pueblos,
so offenders were influential Spanish hacendados who had
private land grants.
The use
of the community land grant to settle the frontier
transformed landless Indians and mestizos from a
dependent class into a landholding class, producing an
amalgamation of Pueblo and Spanish village land-tenure
and social patterns.
The
1821birth of the Republic of Mexico in its successful
liberation from Spanishcolonialismcreated a new world
for the Hispanic villagers and Pueblo Indians of New
Mexico, with removal of repressive church and state
controls. All inhabitants of Mexico, including Pueblo
Indians, became citizens and the legal caste system was
abolished. Mexican
villagers and Pueblo Indians continued to go to the
plains to trade and hunt buffalo, becoming increasingly
dependent upon the produce from those activities. With
the opening of the Santa Fe trade, their small-scale
trade was met with the competition of mercantile capital
from the United States, which gradually drew them into
its fold. Similarly, the raising of flocks became an
increasingly contractual pursuit, the partido
(“sharecropping”), being used more than independent
ownership with increased indebtedness to the owners of
the flocks.
Foreign
traders and entrepreneurs entered the area while the
U.S. government was formulating policies designed to
carve out the northern Mexican territory for
acquisition. The elite of the colonial province began to
emerge during the Mexican national period as an
entrepreneurial class, developing close economic and
social ties with the foreign merchants. Merchants,
artisans, and trappers entered New Mexico immediately
with the opening of the Santa Fe trade, soon controlling
that trade, altering New Mexico’s economic relationship
with Chihuahua to a relationship with St. Louis,
Missouri. Taos, which was the port of entry from 1821 to
1846, became the headquarters of affluent traders and
trappers, who intermarried with the elite Mexican
families of New Mexico and formed a small but powerful
clique known as the “American party.” The foreigners
were able to acquire land grants by forming partnerships
with Mexican citizens, permitting members of the Taos
clique to acquire vast landholdings.
Class
conflict in New Mexico became very sharp in 1837 when
the conservative faction gained control of the national
government in Mexico and attempted to impose taxation,
an outsider as governor, and a departmental system of
government in New Mexico, in effect stripping the area
of local authority. Members of the governing elite of
New Mexico were incensed but did not act. However,
Pueblo Indian and Mexican villagers of the Tewa Basin in
the north revolted, formed a new government, executed
the unpopular governor and his staff, and ruled from
Santa Fe for nearly six months. They presented a
coherent program for a reorganized local government and
demanded that the national government withdraw its
proposed plan. They never suggested secession from the
Republic of Mexico. The revolt, which was crushed by the
New Mexico elite, revealed a growing political
consciousness on the part of the villagers. Its
suppression revealed the class consciousness of the
elite, who had no intention of allowing popular rule in
New Mexico. These same patriotic forces resisted U.S.
military occupation in 1846. All but two villages in the
north declared for resistance. The U.S. military
governor and members of the American party were killed,
land-grant papers were destroyed, and foreigners
throughout the north were attacked. The New Mexico elite
joined with the U.S. military and volunteers from the
American party to crush the resistance.
Southwest
Flair:
What was the socio-economic fallout for indigenous and
Mexican farming communities, once the US gained control
of the region from Mexico in 1848?
Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz:
The cession of northern
Mexico (half of Mexico if the former Mexican state of
Texas is included) to the United States was legalized in
1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. U.S. military
rule was replaced by territorial rule under the U.S.
colonial policy spelled out in the Northwest Ordinance.
Under treaty obligation to protect the property and
rights of Mexican citizens in the conquered territory,
the United States established a procedure that caused
delayed settlement of land titles. During half a century
of political oligarchy, capitalist entrepreneurs entered
the area and obtained titles to land. Lawyers posing as
representatives of the villagers took land as payment of
fees. In general, land became a substitute for money for
the subsistent agricultural producers in the growing
money economy. Their only other marketable item was
sheep.
When
Congress did act to settle land titles, strict
legalistic guidelines were drawn and equitable rights of
the villagers were excluded. Legal procedures were
lengthy and expensive. The most important policy that
emerged was the denial of community ownership of the
common pasture lands. These lands were declared public
domain and thrown onto the market for homesteading,
thereby dooming the future of the Mexican villages so
dependent on pasture lands for their flocks.
Once
practically merged politically under the Mexican state
and an integral part of its revolutionary development,
the Pueblo Indians and Mexican villagers became
separated politically by U.S. colonialism and capitalist
development. The crushing of Navajo and Apache
resistance by the U.S. military ended the centuries of
dynamic interaction that the resistance of those
fiercely independent peoples provided. The necessity for
the Pueblos to win U.S. trust protection segregated them
from general developments until recent years. Since the
1960s, the revival of the land and water rights issues
by all the colonized peoples of New Mexico has brought
renewed contacts and both unity and conflict.
Southwest
Flair:
You have written many books including Blood on the
Border: A Memoir of the Contra War; Red Dirt: Growing up
Okie; Outlaw Woman: Memoir of the War Years; The Great
Sioux Nation: An Oral History of the Sioux Nation and
its Struggle for Sovereignty; and Indians
of the Americas: Human Rights and Self-Determination.
Do you have plans for another book?
Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz:
Yes, I took a break from my scholarly writing during the
1990s and wrote a historical/literary memoir trilogy.
Now, I'm back to writing history, writing a history of
the United States from the indigenous perspective. I've
also been working off and on for many years on a
biography of the post Civil War Oklahoma "bandit queen,"
Belle Starr, in order to tell the story of the
Confederate guerrillas, the best known being Jesse
James, as well as the Cherokee Nation joining the
Confederacy. I'll get back to it.
Southwest
Flair:
You've been a writer, historian, teacher, human rights
specialist, and social activist. What accomplishment are
you most proud of ?
Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz:
I think I'm proudest of the work I began with others in
1976 to take Indian treaties to the United Nations for
support against the U.S. government's continual attempts
to nullify them and break them. This followed the
remarkable Wounded Knee 1973 protests by traditional
Lakotas supported by the American Indian Movement. The
following year, they formed the International Indian
Treaty Council. I began working on the treaty issue at
the time of Wounded Knee. The treaty issue broadened to
the overall situation of Indians in the Americas, with
an international conference at the United Nations in
1977, and then to indigenous peoples in the Pacific and
Arctic regions as well by 1981, when the UN established
a Working Group on Indigenous Peoples. I worked
intensely during that time, learning the UN system and
publishing a book on it in 1984, also training many
indigenous individuals in the work. By that time,
hundreds of indigenous representatives from around the
world had become involved and participation has
increased, with numerous initiatives being established
in the UN system. In the process, I became educated in
the UN system, international human rights and
humanitarian law, and also worked on the refuge crisis
in Central American during the 1980s civil wars, the
majority of the refugees being indigenous, particularly
the Mayans from Guatemala.
Southwest
Flair:
In your work as a human rights activist, you have put
yourself in harms way. Have you ever felt you were in
real danger?
Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz:
I was in danger in the northeast war zone in Nicaragua
in the early 1980s. The Reagan administration organized
and financed insurgents to attack the Sandinista
government, and many Miskito Indians in the northeast
took up arms against the Sandinistas. I traveled in the
region, laden with land mines, to report on the human
rights situation. In the refugee camps for Nicaraguan
Miskitos in Honduras, I was also in danger from the
Honduran military that was supported by the Reagan
administration and was once detained by them. Besides
the dangers of war, I flew on decrepit small aircraft
and traveled in dugout canoes over wild rapids. I am
not a danger seeking kind of person, so it was all
pretty scary.
Southwest
Flair:
Having lived here in the 1970s, what do you like best
about the southwest?
Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz:
I had the honor to be visiting director of Native
American Studies at the University of New Mexico,
1978-1980, while on academic leave from California State
University. I worked long hours setting up a research
institute and publishing reports and books on New Mexico
land and resource issues. I lived in Albuquerque, but
traveled to every Pueblo and many Hispanic villages, as
well as the Navajo Nation, which I love. I was revising
Roots of Resistance from a dissertation to
the book that was published in 1980, so I was interested
in everything and everyone. It was one of the happiest
times of my life. What I like best? The people! Many
observers speak of the landscape and its beauty, but to
me it is the people who have subtly sculpted the
landscape and made it beautiful. I always feel at home
when I visit.
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Click here for New Mexico October Tour Dates
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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was a Visiting Professor at
UNM in the 1970s. Her involvement in human
rights and social activism have introduced her
to many countries and cultures. Recently retired
from teaching at California State University,
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz resides in San Francisco,
California. She will be on tour in New
Mexico from October 7th - October 15th.
Roots of Resistance is available
from University of Oklahoma Press, www.oupress.com
or 1-800-627-7377, or by checking with your
local bookstore.
Simon J. Ortiz, who wrote the foreword, is an
Acoma Pueblo Indian. A poet, lecturer, and
writer, his collection of poems Going for the
Rain won a Pushcart Prize.
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