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Human rights activist and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has been
described as ""a force of nature on the page and off."" That force
is fully present in Blood on the Border, the third in her acclaimed
series of memoirs. Seamlessly blending the personal and the
political, Blood on the Border is Dunbar-Ortiz's firsthand account
of the decade-long dirty war pursued by the Contras and the United
States against the people of Nicaragua. With the 1981 bombing of a
Nicaraguan plane in Mexico City - a plane Dunbar-Ortiz herself
would have been on if not for a delay - the US-backed Contras
(short for los contrarrevolucionarios) launched a major offensive
against Nicaragua's Sandinista regime, which the Reagan
administration labeled as communist. While her rich political
analysis of the US-Nicaraguan relationship bears the mark of a
trained historian, Dunbar-Ortiz also writes from her perspective as
an intrepid activist who spent months at a time throughout the
1980s in the war-torn country, especially in the remote
northeastern region, where the Indigenous Miskitu people were
relentlessly assailed and nearly wiped out by CIA-trained Contra
mercenaries. She makes painfully clear the connections between what
many US Americans today remember only vaguely as the Iran-Contra
""affair"" and ongoing US aggression in the Americas, the Middle
East, and around the world - connections made even more explicit in
a new afterword written for this edition. A compelling, important,
and sobering story on its own, Blood on the Border offers a deeply
informed, closely observed, and heartfelt view of history in the
making.
'Vigorously affirming anarchism's plurality, the authors make a
powerful case for the reconfiguration of anticolonial struggle'
Ruth Kinna, Professor, Loughborough University As early as the end
of the nineteenth century, anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin and
Élisée Reclus became interested in Indigenous peoples, many of
whom they saw as societies without a state or private property,
living a form of communism. Thinkers such as David Graeber and John
Holloway have continued this tradition of engagement with the
practices of Indigenous societies, while Indigenous activists
coined the term 'anarcho-indigenism', in reference to a long
history of (often imperfect) collaboration between anarchists and
Indigenous activists, over land rights and environmental issues,
including recent high profile anti-pipeline campaigns.
Anarcho-Indigenism is a dialogue between anarchism and Indigenous
politics. In interviews, the contributors reveal what Indigenous
thought and traditions and anarchism have in common, without
denying the scars left by colonialism. They ultimately offer a
vision of the world that combines anti-colonialism, feminism,
ecology, anti-capitalism and anti-statism.
Racism after Apartheid, volume four of the Democratic Marxism
series, brings together leading scholars and activists from around
the world studying and challenging racism. In eleven thematically
rich and conceptually informed chapters, the contributors
interrogate the complex nexus of questions surrounding race and
relations of oppression as they are played out in the global South
and global North. Their work challenges Marxism and anti-racism to
take these lived realities seriously and consistently struggle to
build human solidarities.
In our media-saturated culture, momentous events occur quickly, as
news and images are broadcast around the country and the world. We
are often riveted by the news and our everyday reality is suddenly
changed. Yet, almost as quickly, that critical event is replaced by
a new story. The old event fades from memory, and we move on to the
next thing before understanding why it commanded our attention and
how our world was changed. On April 16, 2007, such an event
occurred on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. That
day a student killed 32 of his classmates and professors and then
turned the gun on himself. The media focused their power and our
attention on the campus, the students and faculty of Virginia Tech,
and the gunman and his victims. But we have yet to understand fully
what happened in Blacksburg. There is a Gunman on Campus brings our
thoughts back to the shocking campus shootings and the public
reactions to the event, shining needed light on what occurred at
the university, how American society reacted, and how it all fits
into contemporary culture. The contributors to this insightful and
compelling volume preserve and deepen our memory of April 16th.
Many of the authors are distinguished men and women of letters, and
some were on the Virginia Tech campus the day when the shots rang
out. From the psychology of the shooter to the role of media in
covering the event to parallels to other American tragedies such as
Columbine, the chapters constitute an incisive portrait of early
21st century America.
This anthology draws together essays, interviews and pamphlets
exploring the relationship between anarchism and feminism.
"Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Loaded is like a blast of fresh air. She is
no fan of guns or of our absurdly permissive laws surrounding them.
But she does not merely take the liberal side of the familiar
debate."--Adam Hochschild, The New York Review of Books "If . . .
anyone at all really wants to 'get to the root causes of gun
violence in America,' they will need to start by coming to terms
with even a fraction of what Loaded proposes."-Los Angeles Review
of Books "Her analysis, erudite and unrelenting, exposes blind
spots not just among conservatives, but, crucially, among liberals
as well. . . . As a portrait of the deepest structures of American
violence, Loaded is an indispensable book."-The New Republic
Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, is a deeply
researched-and deeply disturbing-history of guns and gun laws in
the United States, from the original colonization of the country to
the present. As historian and educator Dunbar-Ortiz explains, in
order to understand the current obstacles to gun control, we must
understand the history of U.S. guns, from their role in the
"settling of America" and the early formation of the new nation,
and continuing up to the present. Praise for Loaded:
"Dunbar-Ortiz's argument will be disturbing and unfamiliar to most
readers, but her evidence is significant and should not be
ignored."-Publishers Weekly " . . . gun love is as American as
apple pie-and that those guns have often been in the hands of a
powerful white majority to subjugate minority natives, slaves, or
others who might stand in the way of the broadest definition of
Manifest Destiny."-Kirkus Reviews "Trigger warning! This is a
superb and subtle book, not an intellectual safe space for
confirming your preconceptions-whatever those might be-but rather a
deeply necessary provocation."-Christian Parenti, author of
Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis
"If the moral issues raised by the Sioux people in the federal
courtroom that cold month of December 1974 spark a recognition
among the readers of a common destiny of humanity over and above
the rules and regulations, the codes and statutes, and the power of
the establishment to enforce its will, then the sacrifice of the
Sioux people will not have been in vain."-Vine Deloria Jr. The
Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America is the story of
the Sioux Nation's fight to regain its land and sovereignty,
highlighting the events of 1973-74, including the protest at
Wounded Knee. It features pieces by some of the most prominent
scholars and Indian activists of the twentieth century, including
Vine Deloria Jr., Simon Ortiz, Dennis Banks, Father Peter J.
Powell, Russell Means, Raymond DeMallie, and Henry Crow Dog. It
also features primary documents and firsthand accounts of the
activists' work and of the trial. New to this Bison Books edition
is a foreword by Philip J. Deloria and an introduction by Roxanne
Dunbar Ortiz.
A classic in contemporary Oklahoma literature, Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz's "Red Dirt" unearths the joys and ordeals of growing
up poor during the 1940s and 1950s. In this exquisite rendering of
her childhood in rural Oklahoma, from the Dust Bowl days to the end
of the Eisenhower era, the author bears witness to a family and
community that still cling to the dream of America as a republic of
landowners.
In 1968, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz helped found the Women's Liberation
Movement, part of what has been called the second wave of feminism
in the United States. Along with a small group of dedicated women
in Boston, she produced the first women's liberation journal, "No
More Fun and Games."
Dunbar-Ortiz was also an antiwar and anti-racist activist and
organizer throughout the 1960s and early 1970s and a fiery,
tireless public speaker on issues of patriarchy, capitalism,
imperialism, and racism. She worked in Cuba with the Venceremos
Brigade and formed associations with other revolutionaries across
the spectrum of radical politics, including the Civil Rights
Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the Revolutionary
Union, the African National Congress, and the American Indian
Movement. Unlike most of those involved in the New Left,
Dunbar-Ortiz grew up poor, female, and part-Native American in
rural Oklahoma, and she often found herself at odds not only with
the ruling class but also with the Left and with the women's
movement.
Dunbar-Ortiz's odyssey from Oklahoma poverty to the urban New Left
gives a working-class, feminist perspective on a time and a
movement that forever changed American society. In a new afterword,
the author reflects on her fast-paced life fifty years ago, in
particular as a movement activist and in relationships with men.
An updated edition of a seminal work on the history of land
ownership in the SouthwestIn New Mexico - once a Spanish colony,
then part of Mexico - Pueblo Indians and descendants of Spanish-
and Mexican-era settlers still think of themselves as distinct
peoples, each with a dynamic history. At the core of these
persistent cultural identities is each group's historical
relationship to the others and to the land, a connection that
changed dramatically when the United States wrested control of the
region from Mexico in 1848. In Roots of Resistance - now offered in
an updated paperback edition - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz provides a
history of land ownership in northern New Mexico from 1680 to the
present. She shows how indigenous and Mexican farming communities
adapted and preserved their fundamental democratic social and
economic institutions, despite losing control of their land to
capitalist entrepreneurs and becoming part of a low-wage labor
force. In a new final chapter, Dunbar-Ortiz applies the lessons of
this history to recent conflicts in New Mexico over ownership and
use of land and control of minerals, timber, and water.
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