Two hundred years ago, journalist Rebecca Clarren’s family was prohibited from owning their own land in their native Russia. When her great-great-grandparents immigrated to the United States at the turn of the 20th century they settled on 160 acres in South Dakota, drawn by the government’s promise of free land. The family became pioneers, and an immigrant success story in the American West.
But her family — Ashkenazi Jews fleeing antisemitism — had been given land stolen from the Lakota people.
This cruel irony was the impetus for Clarren’s latest book, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance, a blending of memoir and investigative reporting, and now the frame of her talk at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy. Her presentation on her book reckoning with her family’s history is part of the Interfaith Lecture Series Week Two theme, “Sin and Redemption: Practices and Possibilities for Reconciliation.”
Clarren has been writing about the American West for more than 25 years, and her work has garnered her numerous awards. The Cost of Free Land alone was winner of the Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction, winner of the Will Rogers Medallion Award for Western Nonfiction, a finalist for the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, and shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize.
In The Cost of Free Land, Clarren describes how her family’s history and the Lakota’s history “intertwined like a double helix — invisible, and yet shaping everything.” She traces a cycle of loss of Indigenous land, culture, and resources that continues, and asks what it means to survive oppression — only to benefit from, and perpetuate, the oppression of others.
The book is a first step, she wrote, to dig into and reveal the past. It’s not a complete history of “either the Lakota or immigrant Jews but a narrative of the connective tissue between these groups.”
“The way their entangled histories pull and push against other often refute the idea that pieces of the past exist in isolation,” Clarren wrote in The Cost of Free Land. “At its most basic form this is an American story. It belongs to us all.”
