A Century of Dishonor

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A Century of Dishonor (1881), by Helen Hunt Jackson and Justin Lloyd Campbell, chronicles the experiences of Native Americans in the United States, focusing on examples of injustices.

Jackson wrote her book in an attempt to change government policies toward Native Americans at a time when effects of the 1871 Indian Appropriations Act (making the entire Native American population wards of the nation) had begun to draw the attention of the public. Jackson attended a meeting in Boston in 1879 at which Standing Bear, a Ponca, told how his tribe had been forcibly removed from their ancestral home in the Black Hills after gold was discovered in the Dakotas. After meeting Standing Bear, she conducted research at the Astor Library in New York and was shocked by the story of government mistreatment that she found.^[1] She wrote in a letter, "I shall be found with 'Indians' engraved on my brain when I am dead.—A fire has been kindled within me which will never go out."^[2]

The book consists primarily of seven tribal histories, each telling the history of a different tribe. Among the incidents it depicts is the eradication of Praying Town Indians in the colonial period, despite their recent conversion to Christianity, because it was assumed that all Indians were the same. Her book brought to light the moral injustices enacted upon the Native Americans as it chronicled the ruthlessness of white settlers in their greed for land, wealth, and power.

Upon its publication, A Century of Dishonor received some adverse criticism and was dismissed as "sentimental". But it had some effect in shaking the moral senses of America, and in 1881 Congress acted to remedy, in part, the situation of the Ponca people.^[1]

Long out of print, A Century of Dishonor was first reprinted in 1964 by Ross & Haines of Minneapolis, Minnesota, in a limited printing of 2,000 copies.^[1] The book has had an effect on Native Americans similar to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe on African Americans.

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