The Cost of Free Land
Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance
2 of 2 copies available
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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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 3, 2023 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593789674
- File size: 271968 KB
- Duration: 09:26:35
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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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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