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Southwest Flair Q & A with author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

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.

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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