ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question:  What did homesteaders have to do in order to keep the free land that the United States government had given them?

Rebecca Clarren is an award-winning journalist who writes about the environment, energy and rural America for a variety of national magazines, such as The Nation, Mother Jones, Ms. and High Country News. Her journalism has won the Hillman Prize, an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, and 10 grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Her debut novel, Kickdown was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.

Rebecca’s new book is The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance, which was published by Viking Penguin in October, 2023. This work of creative nonfiction delves into the relationship between the US government and the Indigenous Peoples who populated North America before their land was taken from them.  Clarren’s ancestors were Jews who fled oppression in Russia at the beginning of the 20^th century, and she investigates how federal policies that gave them free land on the South Dakota prairie came at great cost to their Lakota neighbors. The book not only narrates this entangled history but deals with the issue of what can be done to reconcile the past.

This is an important book because it examines an aspect of American history that is not usually taught in the schools and is not very well-known to the general public. It is extremely well-documented and includes photographs, copious notes and resources for further research. At the same time, it is not written in a dry, academic way, but in a story-telling style that will appeal to anyone with an interest in American history, and curiosity about the history and culture of Indigenous Peoples.