The Cost of Free Land

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.