In 1879, Helen Hunt Jackson attended a Boston lecture by Chief Standing Bear about the forcible removal and resettlement of the Ponca from their reservation in Nebraska to Oklahoma. Jackson became an outspoken activist and campaigned for reform to U.S. government policy towards Native Americans. She wrote a nonfiction book about the history of broken treaties, A Century of Dishonor (1881), and mailed it to every member of Congress.

Jackson visited southern California in the early 1880s, taking an interest in the Mission Indians who were forced to live and work at local Franciscan missions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. While there, she outlined the novel that would become Ramona (1884). She consciously modeled her novel after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), hoping that it would change national attitudes towards Native Americans in the same way Stowe’s novel had supposedly done with slavery.