Cost of Free Land

Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the American West for more than twenty years. She is the winner of the 2021 Whiting Nonfiction Grant for her work on The Cost of Free Land. Her journalism, for which she has won the Hillman Prize, an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, and ten grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, has appeared in such publications as MotherJones, High Country News, The Nation, and Indian Country Today. Her debut novel, Kickdown (Sky Horse Press, 2018), was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize.

This heartfelt and well-researched work introduces us to little-known historical realities. Perhaps even more important, Rebecca Clarren explains and models how each of us can approach dealing with uncomfortable truths about the past, and begin to move forward towards healing wounds and wrongs left unaddressed for too long -- Brett Shelton * Native American Rights Fund * In this gripping book, Rebecca Clarren turns her unflinching gaze on her Jewish ancestors who escaped persecution only to unwittingly take part in a holocaust that, in the words of one Lakota man, 'lasted four hundred years.' In taking to heart the counsel of both Indigenous elders and Jewish leaders to seek truth and make redress, she creates a new model for engaged history -- Margaret jacobs * author of After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands * Meticulously researched and intricately woven, The Cost of Free Land proves our personal stories inextricable from our collective history. In her deft distinctions between mythmaking and truth telling, ownership and belonging, absolution and real repair, Rebecca Clarren has written a profound, important book -- Sierra Crane Murdoch * author of Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country * With compassion and guts, Rebecca Clarren illuminates a riveting and important history, while contemplating what should be done about past -and persisting - injustice -- David Wolman * author of Aloha Rodeo: Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World's Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West * The flight of Rebecca Clarren's ancestors from Russia to South Dakota entangled their rising prospects as immigrants with the reduced possibilities of the Lakota. This surprising book reveals the burdens the past creates and the rewards and obligations it offers -- Richard White * Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 *