A Century of Dishonor (1884) is a work of nonfiction by Helen Hunt Jackson. Inspired by a speech given by Ponca chief Standing Bear in Boston, A Century of Dishonor attempts to reckon with the genocide and displacement of Native Americans and the passage of Indian Appropriations Act of 1871. At her own expense, Hunt Jackson sent copies of the book to every member of Congress, hoping to convince them to amend official government policies and to end the mistreatment of indigenous peoples across the country. Largely dismissed upon publication, the book managed to galvanize a minority of white Americans in solidarity with Native people nationwide and led to some minor government reforms. After meeting Standing Bear in 1879, Hunt Jackson spent months at Manhattan’s Astor Library to compile research on the treatment of Native Americans. Using government reports and personal testimonies, she weaves a story of seven tribes whose treaties with the United States were broken, who were removed from their ancestral lands, and whose people were massacred by settlers and military forces. She provides background on the histories and cultures of the Delaware, Cheyenne, Nez Perce, Sioux, Ponca, Winnebago, and Cherokee peoples, arguing that their way of life had a vital impact on the formation of the United States. Crucially, she cites statistics directly from the War Department and the Department of Interior which show that the government openly pursued a campaign of violence against Native Americans. She argues: “It makes little difference, however, where one opens the record of the history of the Indians; every page and every year has its dark stain.” Providing the incontrovertible facts of the nation’s actions, its dishonorable conduct, she demands not just answers, but change. That her activism was largely ignored remains tragic. This edition of Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.
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Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885) was an American poet and activist. Born Helen Maria Fiske in Amherst, Massachusetts, she was raised in a unitarian family alongside a sister, Anne. By seventeen years of age, she had lost both of her parents and was taken in by an uncle. Educated at Ipswich Female Seminar and the Abbott Institute, she was a classmate and friend of Emily Dickinson. At 22, she married Captain Edward Bissell Hunt, with whom she had two sons. Following the deaths of her children and husband, Hunt Jackson dedicated herself to poetry and moved to Newport in 1866. “Coronation” appeared in The Atlantic in 1869, launching Hunt Jackson’s career and helping her find publication in The Century, The Nation, and Independent. Following several years in Europe, she visited California and developed a fascination with the American West. After contracting tuberculosis, she stayed at Seven Falls, a treatment center in Colorado Springs, where she met her second husband William Sharpless Jackson. Praised early on for her elegiac verses by such figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hunt Jackson turned her attention to the plight of Native Americans in 1879 following a lecture in Boston by Ponca chief Standing Bear. She began to lobby government officials by mail and in person, launching and publishing her own investigations of systemic abuse in the New York Independent, Century Magazine, and the Daily Tribune. In 1881, she published A Century of Dishonor, a history of seven tribes who faced oppression, displacement, and genocide under American expansion. She sent her book to every member of Congress and continued to work as an activist and writer until her death from stomach cancer. Ramona (1884), a political novel, was described upon publication in the North American Review as “unquestionably the best novel yet produced by an American woman.”
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