Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (born September 10, 1938) is an American historian, writer, professor, and activist based in San Francisco.

[1] She has written numerous books including Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra Years (2005), Red Dirt: Growing up Okie (1992),[1] and An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014).

[4] Because of her various claims of having Indigenous ancestry, Dunbar acknowledged that she has been "denounced as a fraud pretending to be Native American.

"[5] Dunbar's paternal grandfather was a settler, landed farmer, veterinarian, labor activist, and member Socialist Party in Oklahoma and the Industrial Workers of the World.

The Great Sioux Nation was followed by two other books: Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico (1980) and Indians of the Americas: Human Rights and Self-Determination (1984).

In 1981, Dunbar-Ortiz was asked to visit Sandinista Nicaragua to appraise the land tenure situation of the Miskito Indians in the northeastern region of the country.

Her two trips there that year coincided with the beginning of United States government's sponsorship of a proxy war to overthrow the Sandinistas, with the northeastern region on the border with Honduras becoming a war zone and the basis for extensive propaganda carried out by the Reagan administration against the Sandinistas.

She tells of these years in Caught in the Crossfire: The Miskitu Indians of Nicaragua (1985) and Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War (2005).