Happy holidays to all our readers here, whatever winter celebrations you observe.
This time of year also marks our annual anniversary here at Unsettling; I began writing in late December of 2020, prompted by unsatisfactory discussions from all quarters following the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
We’re edging towards 100 posts in about 3 years’ time, meaning if you're on our list you’ve received just over 30 reflections each year on our relationship to land and place written with the intent of forwarding our collective efforts toward healing and repair.
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Today I’m sharing a book review for The Cost of Free Land, a title I mentioned briefly back in November.
The timing here is intentional: this last week of December is also filled with anniversaries of a more somber nature. December 26th marked the largest mass execution in US history, carried out against 38 Dakota men for participating in the Dakota War of 1862. We covered this war a bit in June, when we discussed public efforts for remembering both the war and those who were sentenced to death by President Lincoln.
The Cost of Free Land begins its story in the early 1880s, so it doesn't cover the 1862 war, but keeping it and the executions in mind will help set the stage for the events it does cover — including the Wounded Knee Massacre, which took place on December 29th, 1890. It seems that the week after Christmas is not full of easy memorials for the nations of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, which makes this a more than appropriate moment to read a book intent on exploring more deeply how one’s personal history might intersect with those memorials in either intentional or unintentional ways.
You can buy The Cost of Free Land at bookshop.org.1
Our own survival may not be straightforwardly just. The tools or means we find available to escape the horrific — immediate terror and harm or long-standing generational trauma — may come at a cost to others, may become interwoven with forces that themselves terrorize and traumatize.
All this may occur without intention to harm. What, then, of responsibility? If knowledge is not more clearly obtained until years, or even generations later, what chance for repair and healing might exist?
Such questions drive Rebecca Clarren’s book, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance, released in October. Clarren chronicles intersecting personal histories of her immediate family and their Lakota neighbors, and embeds this within macro-scale events of the late 19th and 20th centuries. The entanglement of family and world history is what she learns to see in her investigation of the relationship her ancestors had with the Lakota, whose land they came to live upon and profit from. In her book, we travel from the violence of pogroms in Eastern Europe to immigrant-filled New York City, where class and cultural tensions among different groups (including between different waves of Jewish immigrants) lead to efforts to push new arrivals out of the city, with the Homestead Act a helpful policy for that end. In this way, Clarren’s family members come to hold claims for land on the Dakota prairie and reinforce the taking of Lakota land by the U.S. government.
A simple narrative path would limit itself to that moment, and then maybe jump forward to the present time and the benefits accrued to Clarren’s family through later sale of that land. This is a common origin story told in progressive circles about “racial wealth gaps” and housing inequities, as a way to argue for reparations: an unjust taking, be it of land or labor, benefits a particular individual or segment of society, and that benefit accrues over the generations. The present generation, still benefiting from the original taking, thus also inherits a moral obligation to make amends for what is an ill-gotten gain.
I don’t mean to minimize that framing, which has been an important one in movements for reparations. And that broad arc is present in the book, no doubt. But Clarren does not take the easy and direct route. Instead, chapter by chapter, we’re pulled through a longer and more complicated history that pushes us to sit with the experiences of both Jewish and Lakota families through the last 150 years. This isn’t an abstract moral study, but an experiential one.
The chapter “Jewface on the Frontier” is a good sample of this method, in which we see the way racial stereotypes are carried out in both “Wild West” and vaudeville shows, but also hear about the participation of those who are being stereotyped in putting on such entertainment for themselves, and pause to consider what they might have to gain from doing so. Laughing at stereotypical portrayals of both Jewish and Indigenous culture, Clarren suggests, could be a way to mark oneself as “a little more white, a little more American.”
In this chapter and elsewhere Clarren lays out the differential treatment her family members received, even when facing discrimination, in their status as settlers and through their placement in the U.S. racial hierarchy, both in its cultural forms and is it was upheld by growing legal structures. They were still given a place in frontier society not afforded to the Lakota, including a right to own property and to apply for citizenship. They were also allowed their personal religious practices, while much of traditional Lakota cultural practice was outlawed until the 1970s.
Nor does Clarren choose the common route of writing generally about the Lakota as a group. Instead, paralleling her own family history is the history of the White Bull family, from Joseph White Bull of the Mnicoujou Lakota, a warrior and leader present at the Battle of Greasy Grass, to his grandson, Doug White Bull, himself a famous and respected elder who lives on the Standing Rock Reservation. Through the story of the White Bull family, we travel the decades of the genocidal policies of the U.S. toward Native peoples, from the violation of treaties to forced starvation and the intentional destruction of buffalo herds, and the massacre at Wounded Knee, on into the eras of Termination and Relocation.
No matter how much I think I know on these topics, there’s always some new gut-wrenchingly unjust fact to take in. With The Cost of Free Land, I found myself reckoning with the outrageous creativity of federal policymakers and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in finding new methods for stealing land. Clarren gives this a thorough treatment, from the Homestead Act to the Allotment Act and various policies of fractionalization. New to me on this topic was the use of forced fee patents to confiscate land collectively held in trust. This policy re-privatized land parcels, often against the will of its residents, who found themselves suddenly responsible for property taxes they were unable to pay. They were often then forced to sell, if they did not want to risk the chance of losing everything through foreclosure. Or, as was the case for many Native veterans who had proceedings for their land initiated while they were abroad in the service, they might arrive home to find that federal agents had already seized their home and sold it off to non-Native buyers.
The book brings us all the way up to the present day, and the current efforts of Lakota to reclaim land stolen from them and the current bureaucratic hurdles to doing so as well as everyday acts of ongoing discrimination.
Clarren is not content to simply document all this. She’s interested in connecting the dots between different historical events and policies and asking, what now? This is what will make this book especially useful for those who know bits and pieces of this broader history, but are unsure of what to do with it all.
First, she wants us to know that this history doesn’t just end in the U.S. She’s clear about the connection between genocides and land theft in the U.S. and what has occurred elsewhere — most specifically under Hitler in Germany, who studied American policies and practices against Indigenous peoples as models for his own regime (in addition to the regime’s study and use of Jim Crow laws). The legacies of trauma from past events in American history continue to play out elsewhere in the world. In the book’s conclusion she says:
“I’ve written so much in these pages about the Nazis. I’ll return to them here for the last time, because their descendants have arguably worked harder to face the past than Americans. Unlike the United States, Germany has paid reparations to its Holocaust victims. Germany has a national law that requires its secondary schools to teach the Holocaust. These reparations and these lessons are deserving of great critique, as they’re far from perfect, but at least they do exist.”
Describing the brass plaques around Germany that name Holocaust victims, Clarren contrasts this type of public memorial with those in the U.S. “Rather than celebrate the past, as do our American monuments to the Confederacy, Indigenous genocide, and land dispossession,” she says, the German monuments are about evoking shame.
Not everyone in Germany is on board with such forms of public memory and collective repair, and the lack of shame in the U.S. for its history of harms provides them easy justification for their disdain. Writes Clarren:
“German students who complain about the attention given to the Holocaust point to America and Israel as reasons their country’s response is overblown. What was done to the Jews, they say, according to a 2005 Frontline report, wasn’t any different than what Americans did to Indigenous people and what Israelis do to the Palestinians.”
Facing the truth of the history here in the Americas, then, is important for continuing the history of acknowledgment and healing that has happened in Germany, and may be part of helping model the potential for truth-telling and healing in other countries where both the legacy of discriminatory and violent policy and the legacy of trauma are playing out in our daily present, as in Israel and Palestine.
Second, while Clarren may be a journalist, this book isn’t just about telling a story; it’s about the potential for that story to inform our action in the present.
Clarren’s research was interwoven with study with her rabbi about what it meant to seek repair, something she undertook after Judge Abby Abinanti, chief justice of the Yurok Tribal Court, advised her to look to her own culture and traditions for how to respond to a harm. Here’s how she summarizes what she learned:
“The years of study I did with Rabbi Benjamin have impressed upon me that, from their earliest written texts, Jewish scholars have insisted we have a moral obligation to pursue justice, to repair the world, to take responsibility for our part. I've returned, repeatedly, to the famous philosopher Maimonides’ laws of repentance, and his time-tested strategy for making things right. Here is a modern break-down of his six steps:
First: Stop doing the harm. Second: Confess as specifically as possible what harm you have caused and, ideally, say this truth out loud in public. Third: Begin the work of transforming yourself from a person capable of causing to charm to one who isn't. (In ancient days, people changed their names. Today, it might mean therapy.) Fourth: Make financial restitution that reflects the size of a harm. Fifth: Apologize in a way that doesn't necessarily anticipate being forgiven but that makes clear to the victim that you have heard them, and that you understand how you have caused them pain. Finally: When you face the opportunity to cause the same sort of harm, make different choices.
This idea isn’t very far from what Lakota Elders have explained to me about how their communities would traditionally repair. They would talk it through until everyone was satisfied. Sometimes this process was helped by collective ceremony, by taking a sweat together, or smoking the canunpa so that their words were carried to the Creator and, in this way, made holy.
It also isn't very different from the process recommended by the leading research in restorative justice: listen to those who you've harmed, assure that you understand what they've been through, ask what they need and how you can help them, and make a financial restitution.”
It’s not often that we get to see someone model an active attempt at repairing a harm, to ride along with them through the messy process of learning and accepting and charting a new way of holding the past and engaging with the present. But The Cost of Free Land allows us to do exactly that, as Clarren shares her own family’s conversations about what of their history is worth making public, and how they will collectively engage in financial restitution. For anyone attempting their own journey at learning the depth of past harm in the Americas and how to move justly forward in the present, the book will make an excellent companion.
Order a copy of The Cost of Free Land at bookshop.org.
Thanks for reading Unsettling.
Until next time,
Meg
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