Book Reviewed: The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance by Rebecca Clarren

Perspectives of liberty during the formative years of the nation This is author Rebecca Clarren’s confession of collective guilt of her Jewish family in complicit with the decimation of Lakota nation in South Dakota during the expansion of the United States to the Northwestern territories. Her ancestors lived near the heart of Indian reservation where the indigenous population endured massacres, broken treaties with federal and local governments. It is an outright denial of basic human rights of Lakota people. The federal policy had all but exterminated the buffalo population and deprived the Lakota of their land and other resources. They shattered their cultural heritage, and impoverished their reservations. The federal bureaucrats overseeing the brutal boarding schools where Native American children were confined and punished for speaking their language or practicing native culture. Everything you've been taught about America's separation of church and state was a lie in 1869 when President Ulysses S. Grant had appointed Christian missionaries to serve as Indian Agents, official federal representatives on the reservations. These men were in theory moral and beyond corruption in what he called a "peace policy." Grant divvied up seventy-three Indian Agencies among thirteen Christian denominations. Brutality against native kids continued and a recent federal report found that tens of thousands of children died at boarding schools and buried in unmarked graves. Congress, ignoring the promises it had made in both the 1851 and 1868 treaties, allowed settlers to pass through Lakota land and had encouraged them and U.S. soldiers to slaughter the buffalo herds to near extinction. In addition, the United States robbed the Lakota of the gold-rich Black Hills using the threat of cannons and withheld rations. Federal bureaucrats allowed private companies to lease and drill for black gold and other riches, the consent of a Native Nation was required, but that was often overlooked. Oil men sometimes preyed on indigenous ignorance. "There is a dangerous and flammable and explosive substance lurking beneath your land," wrote one oil company to the Ute Mountain Utes in the early 1900s. "We will gladly remove it for you." Author Rebecca Clarren’s family was not responsible for any wrongdoing, but they were beneficiaries of an American occupation. This was a time when the United States wanted white population to migrate to South Dakota. The author’s family emigrating from brutal pogrom in Russia, South Dakota looked attractive for the new immigrants after they discovered the challenges of living as Jews in the cities of the Eastern seaboard. She looks back in time and expresses guilt about her ancestors’ good fortune. Clarren’s most eloquent passages describe her interactions with Doug White Bull, a relative of Sitting Bull, leader of the 19th-century Lakota resistance. Doug’s grandfather fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. At one point, the author accompanies Doug White Bull to the cemetery where his grandfather is buried. When they finally find the gravesite, he kneels and addresses Joseph White Bull in Lakota language. She respectfully steps away. It’s a singularly moving moment embodying Clarren’s observation. The author’s story has intersecting tales of Jewish settlement in the Northwest and the American crimes against the Lakota population. She explains the pride of her ancestors’ endurance in a region known for harsh climate, unforgiving soil, antisemitism, and legal fallout from ill-fated Prohibition-era bootlegging. But overall, the life was good for her family. The author looks for managing her guilt in Jewish texts such as Torah, and discusses with rabbis to find a Jewish way to express her guilt and possibly do good to Lakota people. I find this confounding. She may be proud of her Jewish heritage but why bring her faith when the Lakota population was wronged at every angle of their existence. She should be uniting all religious denominations to do something positive for the Lakota.