The American strategy to exterminate the indigenous people who lived on this continent before the European settlement was many pronged. One of its elements was to entice immigrants from Eastern Europe to come to America with the offer of receiving free land to farm. This offer was especially attractive to Jews in Russia, who were not allowed to own land and were being persecuted and murdered. What these immigrants did not understand was how their acceptance of this free land implicated them in the destruction of Indigenous people on the Great Plains.
On this episode of Locus Focus we talk with Rebecca Clarren, whose book The Cost of Free Land details her own family’s story of their dream of being farmers on the South Dakota prairie and their convoluted relationship with the people they were displacing.