The US government stole Lakota land. Her Jewish family benefited.
It is ironic that author Rebecca Clarren’s Jewish ancestors, driven from Russia by brutal pogroms, ended up settling in the American West on land taken from Native Americans by violent force. As she sets out to examine in “The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance,” her family benefited from policies that encouraged hundreds of thousands of people of European ancestry to move west and claim Native American land.
Clarren has
