The Cost of Free Land-Book Review

In The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance, Rebecca Clarren details how she never questioned her immigrant family’s narrative until all she could do was question how her great-great-grandparents, the Sinykins, arrived to settle on a 160-acre homestead in South Dakota.

Her ancestors crafted detailed family stories of their successes, and failures, set to the common rural tune of humorous hardship. They never mentioned their land, the foundation for their wealth, was “free” because it was stolen several times over from the Lakota by the United States government.

In her work, Clarren weaves together United States historical themes—broken treaties, violence, decimation of food systems, traditions, and language—that include parallel Jewish identity, religion, and cultural history in conversation with indigeneous voices, responsibility for harm, survival, and marginalized history.

Unlike Clarren, I grew up on my (dad’s) family’s remaining 160 acres, the amount of land provided by the Homestead Act of 1862. Unlike Clarren, my Jewish relatives never moved west until my mother decided to flee the east coast and attend Colorado State. She met my father at a party at his house on the working dairy farm (plus a little bit of everything). That “little” wasn’t enough to make a go of it. My grandfather didn’t go big; he got out when I was ten years old.

Today, I have reengaged with the Jewish identity stretched thin by my mother’s untimely death. Today, I live with my father on 160 acres, small by farm standards, but large enough to count him and his brothers in Clarren’s large percentage of white people who own private farmland in the United States, 95%. Clarren’s history in most ways is not my own; yet, her book serves as a reminder, not of shared history, but shared responsibility to fix what is broken.

Readers will find their own parallel histories either through windows and mirrors—haunting comparisons between the Nazis and the United States government’s treatment of Native Americans— and means to engage with their cultural traditions about how to respond to harm. Clarren’s connection with her audience is both professional and personal, inviting further research and reflection around the question: “What does it mean to survive oppression only to perpetuate and benefit from the oppression of others?”

Unfortunately, in today’s political climate I do need continued reminders of my Jewish identity’s history, and Clarren has no shortage of them, citing European laws that made it illegal for Jewish people to own guns and usually to own land. She reminds that exile was the rule and not the exception, which had a separate consequence, Jewish families weren’t farmers.

Still, she reminds me of what maybe my mother somewhere knew: “The idea of a Jewish farmer had deep roots … The Jewish calendar reflects this heritage with rituals and holidays tied to an agrarian cycle of planting and harvest.” (21), and the braiding of farming with feminism, what the Lakota practiced, female authority established through their management of crops.

Those were the myths unsaid, the result of harm and as harmful, and in her chapter “Jewface on the Frontier,” Clarren centers mythmaking as a way to create distance and increase belonging, to shed the image of being a victim. This too, I know, was one of my mother’s goals, one of her favorite scolds, “martyr.”

Ultimately, Clarren’s healing message is a second, and no less important, reminder than a deeper understanding of who I am—understanding responsibility. Making amends is a cornerstone of Jewish life. In her Torah conversations, Clarren recognizes the economic and truth scales that remain unbalanced (86-87). One of Clarren’s mentors reminds Clarren and her readers that it wasn’t the job of the people experiencing trauma to make amends. It’s ours.

“The Lakota language has no words for ‘progress,’ private property,’ or ‘extinction,’” (39) and the next book I read will likely remind me I still don’t have all the words. However, I am recommitted to expressing the few I have, instead of many with no meaning.