Writer, born in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA. She turned to writing after the deaths of her first husband and two sons, remarried (1875), and settled in Colorado. A campaigner for American Indian rights, she highlighted the injustices of government policy in her book A Century of Dishonor (1881). She was appointed to a Federal Commission to investigate the Indian question, and the experience provided material for her successful novel Ramona (1884), which aroused social awareness but was acclaimed mainly for its nostalgic portrayal of old California.
Helen Maria Hunt Jackson (October 18, 1830-August 12, 1885) was an American writer best known as the author of Ramona, a novel about the ill-treatment of Indians in Southern California.
Biography
She was born Helen Maria Fiske in Amherst, Massachusetts, a daughter of Nathan Welby Fiske and Deborah Waterman Vinal.
Her mother died in 1844, and her father died three years later in 1847, leaving her to the care of an aunt.
She attended Ipswich Female Seminary and the Abbott Institute, a boarding school run by a man called Reverend J.S.C.
In 1852, Helen Fiske was married to United States Army Captain Edward Bissell Hunt, who died in a military accident in 1863.
She traveled a great deal. There she met William Sharpless Jackson, a wealthy banker and railroad corporate officer|executive.
Scholars know her as Helen Hunt Jackson, but she never used that name herself -- she only used one married name at a time: Helen Hunt or Helen Jackson.
Jackson and American Indian policy
In 1879, her interests turned to the plight of the Native Americans after attending a lecture in Boston by Ponca Chief Standing Bear, who described the forcible removal of the Ponca Indians from their Nebraska reservation. Jackson was angered by what she heard regarding the unfair treatment at the hands of government agents and became an activist.
She also started writing a book condemning the Indian policy of the government and the history of broken treaties.
She then went to southern California to take a much needed rest. Don Antonio described to Jackson the plight of the Mission Indians after 1833, when secularization policies led to the sale of mission lands and the dispersal of their residents.
Many of the original Mexican land grants had clauses protecting the Indians on the lands they occupied. But, because of the adverse impact of dispossessions by Americans, by the time of Jackson's visit they numbered less than four thousand.
The stories told by Don Antonio spurred Jackson into action. Jackson's assignment was to visit the Mission Indians and ascertain the location and condition of various bands, and determine what lands, if any, should be purchased for their use. With the help of Indian agent Abbot Kinney, Jackson criss-crossed Southern California and documented the appalling conditions she saw.
During this time, Jackson read an account in a Los Angeles newspaper about a Cahuilla Indian who had been shot and killed. On one excursion, Jackson was escorted by wagon to Santa Barbara and stopped off at Rancho Camulos in the Santa Clara Valley, where she visited the adobe of the del Valle family. But the Señora del Valle was not home the day Jackson was there. And at the Mission Santa Barbara, Jackson made the acquaintance of Father Sanchez, a source of great inspiration.
In 1883, she completed her fifty-six page report, which called for a massive government relief effort ranging from the purchase of new lands for reservations to the establishment of more Indian schools.
Jackson, however, was not discouraged by this Congressional rejection. An inspiration for the undertaking, Jackson admitted, was Uncle Tom's Cabin written years earlier by her friend, Harriet Beecher Stowe.
"If I can do one-hundredth part for the Indian that Mrs. Stowe did for the Negro, I will be thankful," she told a friend. Jackson was particularly drawn to the fate of her Indian friends in the Temecula area of Riverside County and decided to use the story of what happened to them in her novel.
Encouraged by the popularity of her book, Jackson planned to write a children's story on the Indian issue.
Her last letter was written to President Grover Cleveland, urging him to read her early work A Century of Dishonor. Speaking to a friend, Jackson said, "My Century of Dishonor and Ramona are the only things I have done of which I am glad.
Each year, the city of Hemet stages The Ramona Pageant, an outdoor play based on Jackson's novel Ramona. Higginson, Contemporaries (Boston, 1900)
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