THE COST OF FREE LAND

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.