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Ann Arbor Jewish Book Festival Program
VIRTUAL PROGRAM
With Author Rebecca Clarren, The Cost of Free Land
Moderated by Deborah Dash Moore, Professor of History, University of Michigan
12:00 PM over Zoom
Rebecca Clarren only knew the major plot points of her immigrant family’s origins. Her great-great-grandparents, the Sinykins, and their six children fled antisemitism in Russia and arrived in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, ultimately settling on a 160-acre homestead in South Dakota. Over the next few decades, despite tough years on a merciless prairie and multiple setbacks, the Sinykins became an American immigrant success story. What none of Clarren’s ancestors ever mentioned was that their land, the foundation for much of their wealth, had been cruelly taken from the Lakota by the United States government. America had broken hundreds of treaties with hundreds of Indigenous nations across the continent, and the land that had once been reserved for the seven bands of the Lakota had been diminished, splintered, and handed for free, or practically free, to white settlers. In The Cost of Free Land, 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.
Award-winning journalist Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the American West for more than twenty years. Her magazine pieces, for which she has won the Hillman Prize, appear in High Country News, The Nation, and Indian Country Today. Her debut novel, Kickdown, was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. An American Inheritance, her work of creative nonfiction, was awarded a Whiting Nonfiction Award. Her work is regularly supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two kids.
