This month's book is The Cost of Free Land by Rebecca Clarren (2023) 335 pages.

Journalist Clarren (Kickdown) provides an empathetic and eye-opening account of her attempts to reconstruct her great-grandparents’ state of mind when they fled Russian pogroms in the 1880s and settled alongside other Jewish homesteaders in western South Dakota on land taken from the Lakota people, who continued to live on nearby reservations. Tracing the parallel history of the two groups and their sporadic interactions, Clarren notes that the settlement where her ancestors lived, called Jew Flats by its residents, was home to 45 homesteads, and that most of its families only continued farming for one or two generations due to the harsh conditions. The Lakota, meanwhile, were victims of an ongoing genocide and large-scale theft of their land; in 1904, for example, the federal government decreed that 9.3 million acres of Lakota land were “surplus” and thus open to white settlement. Clarren melds investigative reporting with personal family history to reveal the intertwined stories of her family and the Lakota, and the devastating cycle of loss of Indigenous land, culture, and resources that continues today. 

If you are new to this group, please register, particularly if you plan to join virtually. Contact Jeff Hartman at jhartman@chelmsfordlibrary.org if you have any questions. Our meetings are held in the library conference room on the lower level and simultaneously via Zoom.