If I could write a story that would do for the Indian one-hundredth part what ’Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ did for the Negro, I would be thankful the rest of my life.

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) turned in the late 1870s from poetry and fiction to advocacy for Native American rights after becoming outraged by federal policy and public indifference. She pursued reform through investigative writing (notably her 1881 exposé *A Century of Dishonor*) and then through a deliberately popular novel, *Ramona* (1884), hoping to reach readers emotionally in the way Harriet Beecher Stowe’s *Uncle Tom’s Cabin* had galvanized antislavery sentiment. The quoted remark reflects Jackson’s stated ambition to create a work of fiction that could awaken sympathy for Indigenous people and spur political change, even if only a fraction as powerfully as Stowe’s novel had done.

The sentence frames literature as a moral instrument: Jackson measures success not by artistic prestige but by social effect. By invoking *Uncle Tom’s Cabin*—a benchmark for fiction’s capacity to shape public conscience—she acknowledges both the scale of suffering she wants readers to recognize and the difficulty of moving a largely indifferent audience. The “one-hundredth part” is a rhetorical lowering of expectations that underscores humility and urgency at once: even a small shift in public feeling would be worth a lifetime of gratitude. The quote also illuminates Jackson’s strategy in writing *Ramona*: to translate policy injustice into an intimate narrative that could make distant wrongs emotionally immediate.