Review

Reviewed by: Ramona Sabrina Starnaman Ramona. By Helen Hunt Jackson. Edited by Siobhan Senier. Toronto: Broadview, 2008. 448 pp. $17.95 paper. Helen Hunt Jackson hoped that she and her novel Ramona would be able to do for Native Americans a fraction of what Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin had done for African Americans. In fact, Ramona did and does still share a great deal with Uncle Tom's Cabin. Ramona, first published in 1884, brought attention to the social problems of race, power, and brutal injustice. While Jackson wrote numerous letters to the editor of the New York Times about specific issues of public debate and submitted reports she had compiled to members of Congress, she tried to raise awareness and fuel dissent on a broad scale by crafting a popular, sentimental romance that would bring the plight of Native Americans into the homes and hearts of Americans across the country. Like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ramona enjoyed an expansive popularity, followed by rejection as a racist work of American imperialism, only to be revived later as a work worth critical examination. Siobhan Senier's recent edition of Ramona addresses the call for critical [End Page 232] reexamination. Numerous editions have appeared since the novel's initial publication in 1884, and the most recent editions have offered the reader not just a supplemental biography of Jackson, but also descriptions of the fraught significance and history of the text. This edition, however, has been crafted more fully to contextualize Ramona in terms of nineteenth-century US-American Indian policy and the discourses that have surrounded it. Moreover, Senier's edition situates the text as a social and historical phenomenon, as well as a part of a scholarly discussion about sentimental fiction and protest literature that has been taking place during the past forty years. This edition includes an introduction that describes Jackson's life and work, offers an overview of the scholarly evolution of work on Ramona and nineteenth-century sentimental fiction, and recounts the reception of the novel in its time. The foreword, "The Ramona Myth and Southern California Tourism" by Phil Brigandi, conveys the historical importance of Ramona as a cultural phenomenon. He describes the myth that has grown up around Ramona—perpetuated not only by the book, but also the many film adaptations and the annual Ramona Pageant in Hemet, California—and the impact that the myth has had on California tourism and on the way Southern California has been perceived across time. Last, Senier has included a series of appendices of supplementary documents that make this edition especially useful in the classroom. The appendices include documents that offer a breadth of late-nineteenth-century opinion on allotment, assimilation, and the state of Indian life in America in the 1880s. These documents reflect not only Jackson's positions as she expressed them in nonfiction texts, but also those of politicians and policy makers and of other white women involved in the execution and reform of US-American Indian relations. Senier includes the writings of Native American intellectuals and activists, a collection of reviews and reflections about Ramona that date from 1885 to 1909, and a collection of photographs and images that depict the early history of the Ramona phenomenon. Senier's introduction highlights Jackson's commitment to Indian activism, including her critique of allotment. According to Senier, Jackson's writings share more in common with Native intellectuals than with other contemporary writers who supported assimilation and allotment. In addition to writing nonfiction texts of direct protest, Jackson wrote Ramona as a protest novel with popular appeal, believing it would further a broad understanding of and resistance to the injustices Native Americans were suffering at the hands of both the American government and unscrupulous whites who displaced Indian residents. Senier describes the traditions of sentimental fiction and protest literature of which Ramona became a part, exploring the vexed questions that emerge when a middle-class, nineteenth-century white woman [End Page 233] writes about American Indians and the racist treatment they endured. Moreover, Senier explores whether Ramona were used by contemporary reformers in a manner that did justice to the novel or to Native Americans...

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