Helen Hunt Jackson - misunderstood romantic, misremembered advocate of Native American rights - lingered some weeks in Los Angeles between December 1881 and the end of January 1882, on assignment for The Century Magazine to write about Southern California as a destination for adventurous tourists. She apparently came with a larger purpose than a series of travel sketches, although her purpose was never fully realized.
The seductive power of an invented past, created by rival mythmakers seeking to preserve their place in newly American Los Angeles, made her plan a failure and Helen Hunt Jackson famous.
Jackson was already known for A Century of Dishonor, an account of the crimes committed in the name of Manifest Destiny against Native Americans (published earlier in 1881). Jackson knew a Californian variation of this bleak story. It implicated Spanish and Mexican colonial practices, the mission system under Jun pero Serra, and the hostility of California's new possessors toward the state's indigenous communities.
Jackson traveled what would soon become a well-worn tourist route from Santa Barbara to San Diego, encountering Native Americans, Latino Californians, and Anglo newcomers as she researched four pieces for The Century Magazine. The first was an uncritical account of the life of Serra (published in May 1883), followed by her observations on the so-called Mission Indians (August), and a boosterish account of the riches of Southern California agriculture (October).
The series ended with a poetic, intimate evocation of Los Angeles as a place suspended between a languid Spanish past and its inevitable American future (published in November).
Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885). She was a journalist, poet, novelist, and social activist whose most lasting achievement, entirely unintended, was the creation of Ramonaland - an ecology of sentiments about a Southern California that never was. Used under a Creative Commons License
Old Basket Weaver. Jackson wrote about the indigenous communities of Southern California and co-authored a blistering report in 1883 to the Bureau of Indian Affairs pleading for federal action to improve their condition. Illustrations by Henry Sandham accompanied Jackson's account of her findings in The Century Magazine. Used under a Creative Commons License
Jackson the travel writer was also Jackson the activist. Even as she researched Serra's life in Santa Barbara and visited tourist destinations around Los Angeles, she was arranging to be appointed a special agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to investigate the condition of native communities in Southern California. Since she did not know the country or the language, her appointment from Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price in January 1883 included the services of Abbot Kinney, whose many interests included Native American ethnography. (Jackson had met Kinney while in Los Angeles and had corresponded with him about their joint project during the first weeks of 1882.)
With Kinney's help as guide and translator, Jackson visited native rancherias and smaller native settlements in San Diego and Los Angeles counties and in the desert valleys around Riverside and San Bernardino. Conditions there appalled her.
Jackson's time in Southern California united three aspects of her life: as journalist, social critic, and romantic. Her outrage at the treatment of native communities fires the Report on the Condition and Needs of the Mission Indians that Jackson and Kinney submitted to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in July 1883. Her melodramatic recasting of these issues dooms the native and mestizo characters in Ramona, the novel of Southern California life she completed in early 1884.
Jackson hoped her report to the Bureau of Indian Affairs would change federal policy. She intended her novel to change the hearts of sentimental, middle-class readers, first through the serialization of Ramona in the pages of The Christian Union, a progressive Protestant weekly, and then through the republication of Ramona that immediately followed.
But instead of inciting protest, Ramona enthralled generations of Anglo readers, furnishing a theater of sentiment in which they learned to identify a place with a sensibility. This affective landscape - elegiac, picturesque, and contemplative - was under construction before Ramona, but Jackson brought her empathy for Native Americans, Mexican laborers, and old Californio families[1] to an emerging sense of place in Southern California and gave it a piercing, melancholy sweetness.
Jackson did not create the image of an idyllic land of abundance and hospitality under a vaguely Spanish sun, but Jackson's name, as the instigator of Ramona memories, is most often recalled when Southern Californians think nostalgically of their home.
As a novel, Ramona was wildly successful. As social criticism, it was a failure. Igniting support for native communities was Jackson's goal, but her strategy - placing fictional memories in a real landscape - sabotaged her intentions. Readers sighed over the sad fates of Ramona and her husband Alessandro, but they longed to be in the places where they felt Jackson's characters still lived. Jackson died in mid-1885, probably knowing that Ramona had not achieved the political effect she had sought.
Ramona failed to be another Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chelsea Leah Pearson argues (in her Master's thesis Call me a Californio' - Translating Hemispheric Legacies in Helen Hunt Jackson, Don Antonio Coronel, and Jos Mart ), because Jackson was unable to manage the multiple, competing, and intersecting historical substitutions that were underway in Southern California in the 1880s. Among those substitutions was a fixed notion of race in place of the fluid racial categories of pre-American California.
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
Helen Hunt Jackson - misunderstood romantic, misremembered advocate of Native American rights - lingered some weeks in Los Angeles between December 1881 and the end of January 1882, on assignment for The Century Magazine to write about Southern California as a destination for adventurous tourists. She apparently came with a larger purpose than a series of travel sketches, although her purpose was never fully realized.
