A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government's Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885) was a poet and novelist who, in the late 1870s and early 1880s, became an influential advocate on behalf of Indigenous Americans. Jackson began writing A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes (1881) after learning about the 1879 Ponca legal case, and in particular the story of Chief Standing Bear, which Jackson describes in Chapter 6 and again in the book’s appendix. A Century of Dishonor garnered national recognition and brought Jackson to the attention of US government officials, including Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz. Jackson’s correspondence with Schurz appeared in newspapers in early 1880 and is also reprinted in the book’s appendix.

Note: this guide uses the phrase “Indigenous Americans” to refer to members of tribes whose ancestors occupied the North American continent at the moment of European contact. Jackson’s book uses the word “Indians,” which will be preserved in quotations.

Summary

The first part of the book summarizes and analyzes the US government’s relations with individual tribes over a period of decades. All chapters in Part 1 feature lengthy extracts from published documents. As Jackson explains in the opening Author’s Note, most of these extracts come from official reports of the War Department or the

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