David S. Koffman on Rebecca Clarren’s *The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance*

Rebecca Clarren’s The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance is perhaps the single best articulation of a puzzle so many Americans and Canadians are now trying to solve: how do I come to terms with the broadly horrifying repercussions on Indigenous peoples of my ancestors’ decisions to move and thrive here while keeping my fidelity to those ancestors whom I love and whose circumstances and visions for the future shaped and continue to mark my very existence? This is a not an easy question to ask.

It’s an even more difficult one to answer. Clarren asks and answers with sobriety, courage, and patience. The book narrates a years-in-the-making auto-ethnographic process, one that brought her in touch and in conversation with two sets of interlocutors. On the one hand, Clarren is in deep and often discomfiting dialogue with the people with whom she speaks directly, including her own Jewish ancestors, rabbis, the Jewish Studies scholars and historians she consults, as well as Indigenous elders and thinkers, neighbors, and friends. On the other hand, Clarren is in serious dialogue with the archive and historical record. The book is as much a product of the author’s personal journey as it is a scholarly project resultant from wide reading on American and American Indian life; the unique genius of this work is Clarren’s ability to pair the people and the records in conversation.

Indeed, the combination of conversations, seamlessly captured in Clarren’s easy writing, well-honed as a peak journalist, is also what makes this book work. Her storytelling is intimate and grueling. So the book she has produced is both a particularistic self-study, and simultaneously, a universally relatable meditation on culpability for the vast majority of inhabitants of North America, “settlers.” Clarren’s readers are necessarily like her: we inherit, and are therefore stuck with, the past.

The Cost of Free Land traces Clarren’s Jewish family’s migration from the Russian Pale of Settlement at the turn of the twentieth century, its settlement in the US in Lakota territory in western South Dakota, and the divergent post-frontier paths of the settler communities (particularly its Jews) and the Indigenous peoples up to the present. The book toggles between periods, at times describing sweeping historical processes of US Indian war, treaty making, and unregulated settler formation, at times homed in on highly local circumstance, and at times sleuthing her own families’ efforts to forge a new life and guarantee a future for their kin and community. The Cost is also the narrative of a gifted writer’s movements across the country as she learns – through slow, old-fashioned conversation and human interaction with the Native and non-Native people she meets as she tries to come to terms with the unevenly felt, if shared, consequences of settlement. The book contains thirty-one study-worthy illustrations, seventy-one pages of sophisticated footnotes for readers interested in deeper engagement, and an excellent appendix of resources for still further research.

While the book’s telephoto dimensions focus on Jews and Lakota in the Dakotas, their travails and choices, and the forces of transformation acting upon them in a highly local way, it is also a much wider view of the larger forces that shaped settlement and fates in the prairies, the profound changes in the political and economic order of America of the early twentieth century, and the long tendrils of these transformations’ ongoing impacts.

Clarren finds the magic point at which personal family histories intersect with the larger historical forces working upon our forebearers (our actual parents and grandparents), the forces that shaped, limited, and influenced their choices and ideas, and thus created the circumstances and choices, biases, influences and opportunities baked into our own experiences and the choices that we can thus make as we move toward our own futures and the futures of our descendants.

As someone who has written a more academic history of Jewish encounters with Indigenous America, I’d argue that the specificity of the Jewish story of settlement / immigration to North America matters, as does paying close attention to the specifically Jewish lens through Jewish subjects understood their own migration experience and the place of Native Americans in this story. It’s important to see settlers not simply as the more powerful party in a colonial encounter structurally favored by a colonial state (with its laws and guns) – which they most certainly were – but as humans burdened with limited choices, extraordinary pressures, poverty, and significant trauma. Read this way – that is, with deep human sympathy – Jews stand in for many other persecuted or victimized minorities who made their way to a burgeoning and usurping America. The Jewish-Lakota story, with all of its Jewish and Lakota specificity, is also a decent stand-in for the Settler-Indigenous story, a story where all the human subjects are both victims and agents, worthy of being seen in their full humanity, rather than caricatured.

In this sense, Clarren’s The Cost of Free Land is a model and an invitation: for people from other ethnic, immigrant, or religious communities to ask how the particularities of their own family / community histories interacted with the particular Indigenous peoples once connected to their own homes. Undertaking family or even local history projects like Clarren’s – for publication, as source material for fiction, theatre, documentaries or podcasts, or for private community and family consumption – has two significant benefits. Firstly, such encounter-histories reframe American histories (personal and communal) as matters that belong to a larger process of dispossession and thus force a re-think of immigration paradigm for families and communities. Such a re-think does not demand the erasure or any diminishment of the difficulties of migration, however. In fact, it demands retaining the dynamics and traumas of resettlement, adding an additional layer of meaning on top, instead. Secondly, such undertakings, if and when they’re taken on by significant numbers of Americans, just might be more impactful than federal legislation or nation-sized conversations about Indigenous reconciliation. Like Clarren, we should think about the pasts that made our current lives possible – our inheritances – and we should talk with others about them.