Rebecca Claren/Photo provided
About 40 miles north of Wall Drug, South Dakota, there is a place some locals still refer to as the “Jewish Apartment.”
More than 100 years ago, under the Homestead Act, the United States gave free land in the West to my great-grandparents, their children, cousins, friends, and about 30 Jewish families.
All recently arrived immigrants spoke Yiddish. Most fled Russia with their lives, but not their livelihoods. These federally owned farms, each containing 160 acres, were to be kept as theirs if they could convert the wild grasslands into farmland.
My family told our children that owning land in South Dakota would make us feel like real Americans. My ancestors, who came from Russia where Jews were not allowed to own land, were able to avoid suspicion of immigration by owning a ranch in a Jewish apartment complex.
This land also had serious economic consequences. From 1908 to her 1970, when my grandmother and her sisters sold the last lot of Jewish Apartments, my ancestor took out her $1.1 million mortgage on free land in today’s value. . With that money, they were able to start other businesses, buy more land and move.
But the land that paved my family’s path to the middle class came at a great cost to the Lakota people. Throughout the late 19th century, the United States entered into treaties with the Lakota Nation that permanently reserved tens of thousands of acres of land in the Dakotas for them.
But the promise was broken when the railroads, the largest companies at the time, wanted to connect California to the East Coast. By 1908, when my ancestors were planting their first crops, Congress had occupied or stolen about 98 percent of the land that had always belonged to the Lakota people in the 1851 treaty.
To further eradicate Native Americans’ connection to the land, the United States made it illegal for Native Americans like the Lakota to practice their religion, culture, and speak their languages. Lakota children were separated from their parents, sometimes by force or under threat of imprisonment, to be educated in boarding schools designed to convert them to Christianity. These schools taught “industrial education” to train indigenous children in trades that did not depend on the land.
None other than Adolf Hitler was inspired by this American model of deprivation. When enacting laws to curtail the rights of Europe’s Jews, Nazi lawyers studied American law. Hitler not only praised American reservations, comparing them to cages, but also publicly praised the efficiency of American attempts to exterminate indigenous peoples.
“Your people and our people went through the same thing,” Doug White Bull, a Lakota elder and former teacher, told me. “But our people went through a holocaust that started 400 years ago. Americans condemn Hitler, and you should too, but they should also condemn themselves.”
Unlike Germany, which has grappled (albeit imperfectly) with its genocidal past, the United States has made little effort to reconcile its theft from indigenous peoples. But it is efforts at the local level to fill this federal leadership vacuum.
Just recently, the Quaker Church paid $93,000 in reparations to one Alaska Native community, the same amount the federal government paid the church for the forced assimilation of their ancestors. . Other churches across the country returned land to indigenous peoples. And in some cities, residents voluntarily pay land taxes to the indigenous people who originally lived there.
Following the guidance of Lakota elders, my family started a fund at the Indian Land Holdings Foundation. The foundation is an Indigenous-led nonprofit organization that has been helping Indigenous peoples purchase and reuse traditional lands for decades. I set a fundraising goal of $1.1 million. This is the amount we received as a mortgage on free land. Anyone can donate, and many people do.
Indigenous elders taught us that our job in life is to be good ancestors and to act in a way that doesn’t create a mess for our children and grandchildren to clean up. For me, for my family, acknowledging the harm done to the Lakota people and trying to take responsibility is a huge benefit for us, but it is a small step toward ending this cycle of harm.
Rebecca Claren is a contributor to WritersOnTheRange.org, an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering vibrant conversations about the West. She is an award-winning journalist about the American West. Her latest book is “The Cost of Free Soil: Jews, Lakota, and America’s Heritage” (Viking She Penguin).
