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.Historians often draw a direct line between the publication of Ra-mona in 1884, and the passage of the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887,crediting Jackson which is to say, discrediting her as having beenresponsible for allotment.(Matthiessen s In the Spirit of Crazy Horsecontains one such critique of her legacy.) The Dawes Act, which de-stroyed reservation holdings by reallocating those lands to individualnatives, was supported by the Indian reformers of that era whopredicted too correctly that allotment would prove a crucial as-similation tool.Mathes s Legacy summarizes the white elite s beliefthat assimilation via private property, education, and Protestantismwould rescue natives from extinction.Siobhan Senier has argued that Jackson s oeuvre is too ambiguousto allow us to dub Jackson the little lady who made the Dawes Act. Jackson, whom Mathes calls a renegade, was neither religious noranti-Catholic, and was only peripherally associated with reformgroups.She did argue at times for allotment, but a review of her let-ters reveals that she also advocated (as she did in California) for theprotection of reservations, with the hope that economic independencewould preserve native culture.Indeed, in 1881 The Nation criticizedA Century of Dishonor for failing to support severalty.And although Ramona contains several picturesque scenes of do-mestic tranquility (every time Ramona and Alessandro are oustedfrom a home, Alessandro builds Ramona another house, and she rel-ishes housekeeping), the book s primary focus was, as Jackson herselfinsisted, the destruction of a people caused by the theft of their lands.It was Jackson s unpopular contention that white settlers were theproblem, not the natives.(Senier believes as well that another eventwent further to galvanize Indian reform than did the publication ofRamona: the Supreme Court s decision, also in 1884, in Elk v.Wilkins, that Indians were not citizens under the 14th Amendment.)Jackson s challenge in Ramona was to walk a line between those twogreat nineteenth-century literary divides, realism and romanticism.AsSenier reminds us, the book s very appeal was its reliance on fact. 260 Conclusions without Ends(Sam Temple, the real-life murderer whose act so inflamed Jackson,toured World Fairs as the real murderer of Alessandro. ) Onemight even argue that the novel s great act of radicalism was the col-lapse of the masculine genre, realism, into the feminine genre,romance all in the cause of cross-racial cultural critique.About which, Senier feels, Jackson did not do quite enough.Jack-son s position as a cultural tourist (Senier 72), and as someone whoenfranchised herself by infiltrating patriarchy to HELP anOther,resulted in an excess of individualism in her thinking.Senier writes, In [Jackson s] formulation, human contact and community lead toempathy, which will lead to social change and activism.However, thebasis for collective action is less clear (58).Ramona s popular reception remains intact: it has undergonemore than three hundred printings; the story continues to be stagedannually as a pageant in Ramona, California; and several film ver-sions have been produced in Hollywood.More sadly, its reception byintellectuals remains intact.Most of the scholars doing work todayon writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Rebecca Harding Daviscontinue to ignore Ramona and its artistic/political achievements,judging, perhaps, Avon s book by its cover.In March 1884, Jackson wrote, Some day I shall write a longstory without a purpose. not a weapon,.but this one, is not formyself (Letters 318).In June, Jackson fell down the steps in her Col-orado Springs home and broke her leg.It was never to heal.In March1885 she wrote Will from California that she knew she was dying, thatshe was ready to go, that she regretted the time her writing had takenfrom their marriage, and that he should marry her niece, Helen FiskeBanfield (which he did).She died on August 12, 1885, in ColoradoSprings, apparently of cancer, and was buried there.She was not yetfifty-five.That year, A Century of Dishonor was removed from printwhile Ramona sold thousands of copies.Six years after her death, inJanuary 1891, the Act for the Relief of the Mission Indians in the Stateof California, based on Jackson s report, finally became law.In Ramona, California, Jackson is known not as the woman re-sponsible for severalty, but as the woman responsible for the twenty-six reservations that continue to exist in southern California.The scribbling-white-woman-busybody tradition continued be-yond Jackson: novelist Mary Austin would publish in 1903 The Landof Little Rain, about the lands and people of the Shoshone southwest; Ten Digressions on What s Wrong 261anthropologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher would collaborate withFrancis LaFlesche in 1911 on The Omaha Tribe; and Theodora Kroe-ber would publish in 1964 Ishi: Last of His Tribe, about the Diggersa Shoshone group of eastern California.Wait.Alice Cunningham Fletcher.Alice Cunningham Fletcher, also enraptured by Standing Bear stalk, felt herself moved to become an ethnologist [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]