A Review of Ramona, a Novel by Helen Hunt Jackson

Often viewed as a romantic portrayal of the rancho lifestyles in California, Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson provides an invigorating insight into what life was like for Native Americans facing encroachment from American settlers. Even though the natives occupied America first, the novel portrays how American colonists utilized their advanced technology and tactics to control and dominate the natives. Jackson illustrated that life for Native Americans deteriorated rapidly once the settlers arrived and they faced discrimination in all shapes and forms from being refused services to having their land taken away from them. Many new Americans achieved the American Dream through hard work and determination, but their success led to the American nightmare for the natives.

Ramona follows the story of the titular character who is a young ward of Señora Moreno. Of Scottish and American Indian descent, Ramona became inextricably tied into a love triangle between her foster mother and her biological father. The father, hopelessly in love with Ramona's adoptive mother, ran off after the foster mother married another man. Ramona's father stayed in an Indian settlement where he married an Indian woman, and the marriage resulted in Ramona being born. With no explicit reason as to why Ramona's father brings the baby to his long-time love and asks that she care for the child. Thus, Ramona was raised by a foster mother, and after the foster mother passed away, Ramona became a ward of her foster mother's sister, Señora Moreno.

The novel follows Ramona's life as she falls in love with Alessandro, the son of a chief belonging to an Indian tribe located in Temecula. With the foster mother forbidding a relationship, Alessandro and Ramona run away together. Plagued by American settlers claiming any piece of land they can find, the couple ultimately lands in the mountains of San Bernardino. During their wanderings and adventures, a daughter is born. They name her Eyes of the Sky, and the six-month-old baby is described as being "lusty, strong, and beautiful, as only children born of great love and under healthful conditions can be" (Jackson 251).

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Unfortunately, the baby dies later on in the story as the couple cannot get anyone to tend to their child. Alessandro and Ramona go through great trials, and Alessandro loses some of his sanity due to the pressure of constant wandering and instability in their lives. They do go on to have another daughter, named after Ramona but the somewhat peaceful life they had started creating ends abruptly when Alessandro is shot by a settler after Alessandro take's the settlers horse.

Overwhelmed by intense grief, Ramona is found by Señora Moreno's son Felipe who always harbored feelings for Ramona and the two marry. They flee to Mexico to escape the onslaught of encroachers. The two have children together, but the novel notes in the end that "Ramona, daughter of Alessandro the Indian" is their favorite child (362). Ramona ends with the marriage of Ramona and Felipe and their successful and modest lives in Mexico but also ends with Ramona acknowledging that the marriage between her and Felipe will never compare to the love she shared with Alessandro.

To highlight the importance of mistreatment of native groups, Jackson utilizes various writing tactics to convey her message, and while they support her story, these tactics distracted some readers from the more critical issues. In the review "Ramona Memories: Fiction, Tourist Practices, and Placing the Past in Southern California", author Dydia DeLyser notes that Jackson's most prominent feature of Ramona include her "descriptive passages" as she paints beautiful imagery of California and creates detailed descriptions of the lifestyles of both American Indians and the ranchos. Jackson is careful to portray "that the lifestyle she depicts is fast disappearing but not yet vanished beyond retrieval" (DeLyser 892).

Jackson demonstrates her art of story-telling as she creates various settings and fictional characters who are "no less [than] exotic" and capture the hearts of readers while simultaneously portraying historical events and stressing the importance of the mistreatment of certain racial groups like Native Americans (DeLyser 892). Jackson builds these descriptions up so that the readers will lose themselves in the story and pay close attention to each detail and each message.

However, DeLyser finds that "Jackson's Indian message is lost in her romantic portrayal of southern California rancho life-lost in precisely what it was that made her novel interesting to her white audience" (DeLyser 893). When appealing to a majority race about a minority, an author must be conscientious not to let the audience become enamored with side stories less relevant to the bigger picture. Unfortunately, this is precisely what happened in Ramona. Many of the readers got distracted by the settlements and how picturesque and quaint they appeared rather than recognizing the cruel and harsh treatment of the natives. Perhaps, for some, this was intentional as many people do not want to acknowledge the wrongdoings of their ancestors but focus on something else and the rancho lifestyles depicted in the book offered that distraction.

The American Dream is simple. Live in a modest home with your family (typically consisting of a spouse and at least one child) and have a reputable job that pays enough for living expenses and some extras. The American Dream can be summed up in one word: prosper.

In the mid to late 1800s, Americans and foreigners alike desired to fulfill this dream in the new state of California. Full of opportunity and mystery, migrants flooded to the state, and a new era began. But, while this meant success for thousands of migrants, it spelled doom for the original inhabitants: the American Indians. Dominique Heald in "Women in Between" points out that the story was written, "when the dominant social status and racial categories of the Californios had succumbed to Anglo-American capitalist expansion" (Heald 149). Yes, Native Americans suffered long before the Anglo-Americans arrived but the new migrants caused their sufferings and hardships to increase exponentially.

Additionally, Heald mentions that Ramona "did little to ameliorate the plight of Mission Indians" (Heald 149). Heald asserts that the best Ramona could do was implement the feeling of nostalgia in the readers without moving them enough to call for change. With "industrialization, urbanization, modernization, and mass immigration, the images of the 'doomed Indian' and the 'vanishing frontier"" became little more than a memory (Heald 150). What settlers saw as advances caused American Indians to see their homeland and everything they knew disappearing rapidly. And if the Native Americans weren't killed directly by the settlers, they suffered from the ongoing madness of being driven from their homelands, and the consistent homelessness tore at and broke down these people. For them, they had no say in the rapid change taking place in their homes but instead had to watch everything slowly melt away along with their livelihoods. It was a living nightmare for them.

Along the novel's prominent message, Jackson integrates various themes and symbols to support the message. She brings to light themes of love, family, racism, colonization and settlement and the inequality that almost always follows a drastic change. The first child of Ramona and Alessandro is symbolic of the powerful love the couple share between each other and the freedom that their love brings. They are, without a doubt, marginalized and oppressed by American settlers but the love they have for each other and the love that comes from their little family gifts Alessandro and Ramona a different kind of freedom.

They can escape from their nightmare like conditions by shifting their focus to their family. Just like any storm, there is a silver lining. Ramona features a few of these, such as the birth of their second daughter, the family staying together and Ramona's subsequent refuge in Felipe and Mexico proving that even in the worst of times hope can be found.

There is no doubt that without the urbanization and arrival of new migrants and immigrants, the majority of us would not be here in California today. Does one have to ask, at what cost is it ok to justify these people coming to California? The displacement and eventual genocide of thousands of native peoples? The American dream became so idealized and desired that people willingly trampled on the livelihoods and hearts of those who were here first.

Ramona provides a heart-wrenching insight into the difficulties that a Native American couple routinely faced and the fact that they never got rest from their troubles lingers all the way until the last page, as Ramona spots a pair of dove and acknowledges that the hardships she faced and heavy loss of her husband and first daughter will never leave her, despite what Felipe promises. After all, the worst nightmares we have always stick in the back of our minds as a dark memory that becomes dredged up at the slightest provocation.

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