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The Cost of Free Land

Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Winner of the Will Rogers Medallion Award for Western Nonfiction
Finalist for The Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize
Shortlisted for The William Saroyan International Prize
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
"Sharply insightful . . . A monumental piece of work."The Boston Globe
An award-winning author investigates the entangled history of her Jewish ancestors' land in South Dakota and the Lakota, who were forced off that land by the United States government

Growing up, Rebecca Clarren only knew the major plot points of her tenacious immigrant family’s origins. Her great-great-grandparents, the Sinykins, and their six children fled antisemitism in Russia and arrived in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, ultimately settling on a 160-acre homestead in South Dakota. Over the next few decades, despite tough years on a merciless prairie and multiple setbacks, the Sinykins became an American immigrant success story.
What none of Clarren’s ancestors ever mentioned was that their land, the foundation for much of their wealth, had been cruelly taken from the Lakota by the United States government. By the time the Sinykins moved to South Dakota, America had broken hundreds of treaties with hundreds of Indigenous nations across the continent, and the land that had once been reserved for the seven bands of the Lakota had been diminished, splintered, and handed for free, or practically free, to white settlers. In The Cost of Free Land, Clarren melds investigative reporting with personal family history to reveal the intertwined stories of her family and the Lakota, and the devastating cycle of loss of Indigenous land, culture, and resources that continues today.
With deep empathy and clarity of purpose, Clarren grapples with the personal and national consequences of this legacy of violence and dispossession. What does it mean to survive oppression only to perpetuate and benefit from the oppression of others? By shining a light on the people and families tangled up in this country’s difficult history, The Cost of Free Land invites readers to consider their own culpability and what, now, can be done.
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    • Library Journal

      May 1, 2023

      To escape antisemitism in Russia, Whiting Grant winner Clarren's great-great-grandparents fled to the United States with their six children at the turn of the 20th century, finally settling in South Dakota. What they did not acknowledge, and what Clarren knows and explores here, is that their 160-acre homestead was taken from the Lakota by the U.S. government. Prepub Alert.

      Copyright 2023 Library Journal

      Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      September 1, 2023
      A deft mix of personal and social history that recounts the transfer of Native American lands to non-Indigenous settlers, including Jews fleeing antisemitic violence. Clarren, who has spent many years reporting on the West and "attempting to write articles that expand our fixed ideas about the region," delivers a fascinating narrative that centers on a great irony: In the 19th century, the federal government removed Native peoples of the Great Plains to reservations and granted their stolen lands to immigrants, many displaced from lands of their own. Some of the author's ancestors, Jews escaping tsarist Russia, wound up on Lakota land, settling on a patch of South Dakota prairie locals called "Jew Flats." It was a transformative moment, for, driven from place to place, they "believed that having land was the hedge against exile," protection from being further uprooted. Locals still remember the family, whose descendants left long ago, and a divisive effort to transform Jew Flats into an oilfield. Taking a larger view, Clarren observes that many Jewish immigrants, suspected of being something other than white and American, did their best to assume the interests of the conquerors as their own, even though, in real terms, they had more in common with the dispossessed Native peoples. Ranging widely across the Plains and reporting deeply from reservation lands and neighboring non-Indigenous communities, Clarren inserts a Talmudic adage that if a homeowner knows that even a single beam has been stolen from someone else, it's that owner's duty to make amends. She returns to it with the observation that the theft of Native lands undergirds much American wealth, for which reason she is working to return what she reckons to be her share of her family's holdings of yore, "our piece of the stolen beam." Free land comes at a cost. Clarren's memorable book, troubling and inspiring, seeks a humane path toward restitution.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      September 1, 2023
      Journalist Clarren tells the story of her Jewish immigrant family who, fleeing pogroms in Russia, settled in South Dakota around the turn of the twentieth century. Like many Jews escaping antisemitism, the Sinykins were drawn to the U.S. with dreams of freedom and democracy. As Clarren acknowledges throughout the book, the new beginnings sought by this exodus of immigrants from Eastern Europe were achieved at the expense of the indigenous tribes already occupying the land. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres to any adult citizen willing to farm a parcel. The Lakota, who had lived on the Great Plains for centuries, were increasingly being pushed onto smaller reservations and, despite some victories over the U.S. Army, saw their land and buffalo diminish. Clarren explores what it means to be descended from a persecuted population whose deliverance comes at the expense of an even more marginalized group. While the history Clarren recounts will be familiar to many readers, her excavation of her family's story adds texture to the sweep of the U.S. expansion westward. The author will likely inspire readers to confront their own complicated inheritances.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from November 20, 2023
      Journalist Clarren (Kickdown) provides an empathetic and eye-opening account of her attempts to reconstruct her great-grandparents’ state of mind when they fled Russian pogroms in the 1880s and settled alongside other Jewish homesteaders in western South Dakota on land taken from the Lakota people, who continued to live on nearby reservations. Tracing the parallel history of the two groups and their sporadic interactions, Clarren notes that the settlement where her ancestors lived, called Jew Flats by its residents, was home to 45 homesteads, and that most of its families only continued farming for one or two generations due to the harsh conditions. The Lakota, meanwhile, were victims of an ongoing genocide and large-scale theft of their land; in 1904, for example, the federal government decreed that 9.3 million acres of Lakota land were “surplus” and thus open to white settlement. Throughout this sweeping history, Clarren focuses on individuals, profiling several generations of her family, all of whom eventually left Jew Flats—one relative became a rodeo rider and oil prospector—as well as Joseph White Bull, a Lakota chief and contemporary of her great-grandparents, and his descendants, some of whom she got to know in the course of her research. This is a unique and important contribution to American history.

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