Join us as we learn from Rebecca Clarren how Jews settled on land in the Western United States in the 1890s that was later discovered to have been stolen from Native Americans through a series of broken treaties. 19th and 20th-century federal policies gave Ms. Clarren's Jewish ancestors free land on the South Dakota prairie and a path to the middle class which came at great cost to their Native American neighbors. 

Her latest book, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance, not only retells this entangled history, but it grapples with what can be done to reconcile the past with the present.

Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the American West for more than twenty-five years. The Cost of Free Land was named a Best Book of 2023 by Kirkus Books, The Forward, The Christian Science Monitor and The Tribal College Journal.  

On Zoom
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