06/02/24 - Rebecca Clarren (Repeat)
It's time for First Voices video with Tielkerson, Ghosthorse. Please stay tuned. What makes you such a threat? We choose directly who we are. We know the difference between the reality of freedom and the illusion of freedom. There's a way to live with earth and a way not to live with earth. We choose the way of Earth. It's about power.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:So welcome my relatives who are listening, and I shake your hands with a good heart, and it's good for all of us to be here and look to the forever ones who were here before we all were to those relationships, and today will be a good day. This episode of First Forces Radio will be interviewing Rebecca Claren, the cost of free land. In the 19th century, the federal government removed native peoples of the great plains to reservations and granted their stolen lands to immigrants, many displaced from lands of their own. Some of the author's ancestors, Jews escaping czarist Russia, wound up on Lakota land, settling on a patch of South Dakota prairie. And taking in a larger view, Claren observed that many Jewish immigrants suspected of being something other than white and American did their best to assume the interest of the conquerors as their own, even though in real terms, they had more in common with the dispossessed native peoples, the Lakota.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:I'd like to welcome an an honored guest and Rebecca Claren, who've been writing about the American West for more than 20 years. She's the winner of the 2021 Whiting nonfiction grant, or her work on the cost of Freeland, her journalism for which she has won the Hillman prize, and Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, and 10 grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism has appeared in such publications as Mother Jones, High Country News, The Nation, and Indian Country Today. Her debut novel, Kick Down, published by Skyhorse Press in 2018, was shortlisted for the Penn Bellwether Prize. And you can look up more about Rebecca Claren at Rebecca hyphen claren. That's Rebecca with 2 c's and claren with 2 r's dot com.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Also find her on Twitter and Instagram. So, Rebecca, thank you, and it's an honor, and welcome to First Voices Radio.
Rebecca Clarren:I'm so, so honored to be here. Thank you for having me.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Yeah. Where do we start? I I I think Rebecca is first character that jumped out at me is Harry. What happened to Harry in Russia? Maybe we can start there and go along the timelines as as how your family was affected by moving to the United States in those times, maybe a century and a half ago or so, and how a relationship that you begin to discover in your own lifetime was revealed to you with the land, with the indigenous peoples.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:So start there. Thank you again for joining us on First Voices Radio.
Rebecca Clarren:Yeah. Happy to. Yeah. I started even though my my great grandparents and my great great grandparents were homesteaders on the South Dakota Prairie, It was important for me to begin this book in chapter 1, not there, but in Russia because it I wanted to explain the context of why my family comes to America and why they come to South Dakota. So my family are Jewish, and they were living in what was called it wasn't called a reservation.
Rebecca Clarren:They called it the Pale of Settlement, but it was a part of Russia what was then Russia. Today, it's parts of Belarus and Poland and other Ukraine. And Jews were sort of they could only live in certain areas, and they weren't allowed to own land, and they weren't allowed to work in certain jobs. There was a lot of risk to them to their actual bodies. My great great grandfather was beaten to within an inch of his life and left to die, by Russian peasants or soldiers.
Rebecca Clarren:We don't really know, but it was part of a pogrom in Odessa in 18/81. And every single rib of his was broken, and he he left and went home to where his mother was living in this little shtetl called Capulia. And he then, you know, gets married, has 6 kids, and life is so hard for them that when he has the chance to come to America for a better life, he jumps at that chance. And he joins his younger brother who's already living in America in Sioux City, Iowa. Sioux City was the end of the railroad line, and there were a lot of other Jews from their exact same area of Russia that were already living there.
Rebecca Clarren:Now what I think is true based on my research and old family documents that I found I have a letter from a bank, and I have another letter that my great grandfather wrote describing this letter and loan. What seems to me is clear is that my great great grandfather, Harry, got a $900 loan on the value of a free federal homestead, and it was that money that he used to bring his wife and 3 youngest kids, the last people of his family who were still in Russia, over to America, and that happens in 1906. And so as I read in the book, before my great grandmother who I'm named for and her mother even come to America, their lives and their fortunes are entangled with the lives and fortunes of the Lakota because, of course, the land that was freely given to my ancestors had been unfairly taken or stolen from the Lakota nation by the United States.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:This idea of, as you describe it, obsession with the new world seemed to permeate all of America before your family actually arrived. And that goes into the newspapers, and your family actually what I'd say to jump ahead is not knowing what the experience of native peoples were with that new world that was being told to everybody that it's free and that your family actually needed a farm.
Rebecca Clarren:Yes. My family not only are the stories that they're told and other Jewish homesteaders were told that, first of all, they were told that the land was totally empty. So they didn't necessarily even know that the land I mean, it's hard to know what they knew exactly. Right? I can't talk to them.
Rebecca Clarren:They've died. But it they they don't indicate in any of their letters. I have thousands of pages of letters that were kept to theirs and journals, and there's no writing about native people at all. And, yeah, they they think this is freelance. The newspapers there I found these old newspaper clippings in the Sioux City papers that says, you need a farm, and it's all and there were broadsides that and in railroad lay stations, there would be these posters, you know, free land, and it would it made it seem like it was so easy to farm this land and make a living off the land.
Rebecca Clarren:Like, they talked about how the weather was so good in these articles. And, of course, we know that it's very, actually, very difficult to farm in South Dakota, especially before there was a lot of irrigation. And the land that my family was getting, there was limited access to water. So within a few years, my family I found the National Archives records of my family, and they lose their crop very many years in a row. And then they decide to become ranchers, and they go in for cattle.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Now in that process of making their way out to Sioux City, there were these ideas that you could make it on the land because it was being presented as beautiful heaven, basically. And you could the land was free. And and coming from the, the torment that was happening in Russia, this timeline of be seeing this new world and the opportunities that were available to not just Jewish people, to all Americans. It also didn't tie in the vulnerability of native peoples. And throughout your book, I'm seeing this mainstay of this irony, this juxtaposition of many instances, but a lot of that other history of native people were swept under the rug, so to speak, because it had to do with democracy in its pristine manner that was given to people.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:You say in your book that 2,500,000 Jewish people were exited Eastern Europe to come to the US because of the treatment.
Rebecca Clarren:An estimate of that. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Mhmm.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:And and when I'm seeing, like, this the seeding of where I come from in in South Dakota, you know, the the the stories that we heard as as children and hearing it from my grandfathers, our mothers, our fathers, was that there are other people coming still then and that we didn't know how to understand the language. There is no word for progress. We don't have the word for private property. We don't have the word for extinction. And I would add to that, Rebecca, that we don't have the word for domination.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:And so
Rebecca Clarren:Exactly. Right.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Of this made sense. Go ahead. Yeah.
Rebecca Clarren:No. I love that you point that out. Exactly. I mean, and and that there was my understanding, although, of course, you can speak to this better than I can, is that there wasn't also lying wasn't something that was was part of the culture. And so when the these treaty negotiations would be going on and there was all this political doublespeak, which was very common and still happens today, of course, in American politics.
Rebecca Clarren:But as, this indigenous elder told me, you know, when you have a culture that has no lying as part of its culture, you have no defense system to that. You're very, you know, you're vulnerable to those lies because you're not anticipating them. And so there's the sense that, yeah, there weren't how did the words that were being used gets translated in those treaty negotiations? And how was there even an anticipation that people could be not telling the truth, not being wholeheartedly truthful?
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:And coming out of that period before your ancestors, your great grandfather, great great grandfather arrived here, I remember stories about the the religion or culture being outlawed, banned back in the 9 18 eighties. And still hearing the stories from old people when I was very small about that. And it was amazing that I am this old now, and I still remember that, what they were going through in 18 eighties.
Rebecca Clarren:What did they tell you? What did they say about what they did they talk about what it was like for their own religion and culture to become illegal?
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:It was always it felt like you had to keep a secret. It felt like you had to hush-hush in every moment that you couldn't be who you are because we weren't, quote, unquote, wide enough. Right? So we had to hide that. And and some of the results were our mothers, our parents would not teach us the language or the ways of the Lakota because that was evil.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:And so we we know that because the same way, you all were treated in in Europe and Russia and places like that is that we had to serve to adopt. We had to adapt to adopt, basically, to survive and appear like we were getting along and doing the right things just to survive. And that is still in my generation, it's still meted out in in behavior patterns. And we're just starting to understand that, but I think it's it's a loss of ceremony and culture that is skipped a generation. And part of that is understanding the history, that we need to understand other people's history so that we can see where we're we are alongside that history.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Yeah. So I think that part of
Rebecca Clarren:the I love that.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:The the attitude of the oppressor is is what we shouldn't accumulate, so to so to so to speak.
Rebecca Clarren:I think it's so interesting and obviously heartbreaking, the legal efforts to, you know, cult cultural genocide, I guess, is what we would call it today. And yet I see such echoes in my own family as they come to America. Not that there were laws banning Jews, but there was such a pervasive and handed down fear that even I experienced I mean, I grew up going to synagogue. I had a bat mitzvah. I feel very Jewish, and yet there's a story I tell in the book of my mom.
Rebecca Clarren:I was very young and my mom saying, you know, when we leave the synagogue, take your star of David necklace and tuck it under your shirt. You know, you don't wanna look Jewish, and we were white enough. I like your phrase white enough. We could we really present in my family. Not all Jews are white, but we look white enough that we pass.
Rebecca Clarren:And yet, you know, my great grandparents, they spoke Yiddish, which was a Jewish, blend of Hebrew and Russian and German, and they worked very hard to not teach their children Yiddish and to not speak with an accent. They wanted to be American, and that was survival for them. They wanted to assimilate, and that's it's very different because it wasn't forced assimilation. But their fear of being oppressed in this new country, I think, did lead some of them to drop certain traditions and languages that we no longer have.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:I'm understanding that there was a certain amount of, if I can tie this in, Rebecca, is American exceptionalism that we weren't at fault as Americans as to what happened to native people, to other minorities that came to the United States. Unless you became American and dropped your cultures, that you too could be part of this great expansion. To me, there's there's a certain amount of bypass language in that to deny cultures of and and just allow xenophobia to run rampant. You know?
Rebecca Clarren:Totally. Like, it's this idea of the melting pot, which is but, of course, what's the dominant culture? It's not like, oh, we're all gonna drop our cultures and have a brand new culture. We're all just supposed to adopt the dominant Christian white viewpoint. Right?
Rebecca Clarren:So it's a lot it's another one of those kind of lies actually The the words that are used are we're all gonna be exceptional in a melting pot, and that's how we become free. But the more I looked at that, the more it felt very untrue to me.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:We're talking with Rebecca McLaren. She's the author of The Cost of Free Land. And I was so interested in why do I want to interview Rebecca and what could appear and what little has appeared in the American Americana, the the, American conscience as compared to consciousness that your people brought with who you are as as who we are as native people losing the consciousness and being involved in a conscience. Am I doing the right thing so that I could be accepted into the American at large mental behavior. I don't know how to put that, but these words often don't fit what I'm feeling.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:And I think part part of that is appearing it's coming out now, and there's there's feels like we can't stop this truth that you bring in this book, as well as I'm reading it and really rereading history of native people in it, not just of the Lakota, but in general other native people and how Americans appear they made good on the promise of melting pot and ever and even asserted a spiritual connection to the American landscape. Now, later on that could come out as New Agey, New Ageism, you know, that they have a spiritual connection while extracting. Yeah.
Rebecca Clarren:Right. But for my family, this idea that they, as immigrants, some of them weren't even citizens yet and that they had they were certain they were now landowners who could, you you know, get mortgages out that that helped them build their wealth. That it really helped them feel more American. Apparently, my great grandmother and her sister would call the land the good earth. They really like, they felt very proud to be landowners.
Rebecca Clarren:And in part, it was because they hadn't been old. You know, they couldn't own land in Russia. So this was very important to them.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:That seems not just to be of ownership, but of an actual feeling consciously consciously a feeling that you felt that I think goes back to all the indigeneity of of who we truly were and are as human beings. As long as we're good to the earth, the earth will be good to us. Yeah.
Rebecca Clarren:Yes. That's true. I mean, my as you know from the book, my great grandparents, they keep their land on the prairie, but they end up having saloons in the Black Hills in Leeds. And they also you know, they're very their orientation is very capitalistic. How do we make money here?
Rebecca Clarren:How do we survive? How do we not get exiled again? And yet they also really, I think, did love the land. They called it god's country is how they describe the Black Hills. And, my even after they moved away, my great grandmother would travel back and visit the Black Hills all the time and bring her children, and, she really thought it was I mean, of course, it is a gorgeous place.
Rebecca Clarren:You know? You can't help but feel that way when you go.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:In chapter 4, when you start describing Richard Henry Pratt, brigadier general, that all the Indians in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man carried on by Teddy Roosevelt, the cultural genocide designed to tighten the the national wallet. Basically, the the more we killed Indians, the more the better off economically the US would be. So generally, one of my my question is that no matter what we did as native people, cultural genocide was the more they got rid of us, the more accessibility to land they had and to represent a dream of democracy which hid capitalism.
Rebecca Clarren:Yeah. I think I I really I rewrote that chapter so many times, but I, because I was trying to as you know, I'm I'm talking about 3 different distinct efforts of cultural genocide, you know, converting, native people, taking children away to industrial schools, and changing economy native economies to ones of agriculture. There are entire books, of course, written about each of just those processes. But, yes, I felt like they all were part of the same effort, and I think there was my sense from my research is there were some people who were clearly just doing this because it was, as you say and as I write, good for the federal wallet. It was cheaper than actually having the military on the planes and paying for soldiers to be outright killing Indians.
Rebecca Clarren:Instead, it was better to sort of cheaper to be turning them and assimilating them by force. And I think there were other people. It was very much sold in the newspapers to the American public that this was a good thing. And so who it's hard to tell who was a true believer in this idea of, kind of cultural evolution that we can give native people these tools and they will become, quote, unquote, elevated into, like, civilized society, you know, and and who was just really in it for the land. And by severing native people's connection to land, this idea you could just take more of it.
Rebecca Clarren:I think it's probably a mix, but, there were those both prevailing attitudes were out there.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Staying with the prevailing attitude of civilizing native people as far as, like, I love this, how to have a job that didn't rely on land. Would you explain that?
Rebecca Clarren:Well, I think it's you it's really clear when you really look at what kind of jobs the kids are learning how to have in these industrial schools. No one is expecting native children to become the next presidents or doctors and lawyers. They're only allowed to go to school for half the day. The rest of the time, they're learning trade skills, but it's not necessarily how to be a rancher. They're learning how to be domestics, you know, servants and how to iron clothes and do laundry and how to I mean, then one of the heartbreak most heartbreaking things I read was, oh, all these children are dying in these schools, and the kids in the carpentry classes are are building their graves.
Rebecca Clarren:Like, these are the kinds of jobs they're getting. It's clearly to have jobs where you can go and work in a city. You can have a job that is not dependent on land.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Let's go to your family. You know? Now they've homesteaded on a or homesteading, especially in the late teens and early twenties, and things begin to happen as as far as more land being taken away, the the prohibition. This is where I start understanding that there is a whole complexity of how finding more about native people, especially the Lakota, along the Cheyenne River, they're at a place called Jew Jew Flats. Out in the middle of nowhere, people say, but I don't see it that way, And I really understand what that means when there's no civilization.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:I'm also wondering how your grandparents that you talked to, how your aunties and uncles that you talked to understood that time during the Woodrow Wilson era when a lot of these policies begin to formulate to take more land, to to acclimate Jewish people, Americans to that here's the land now. Come and get it. It's yours, quote, unquote.
Rebecca Clarren:Mhmm. I I I talk about in the book, and it's how I feel, that there's a lot of white space at the margins of the stories that I was told and that were handed down to me by my grandparents and my aunties about my family's time as homesteaders. And then that's really what motivated this book project was my curiosity around what what are the stories we tell in families and in nations, and what are stories we don't tell? Why aren't we telling certain stories? And here we I had all these amazing stories about my family's time as homesteaders that really reinforced the narrative of their how tough they were, how they stayed committed to their religion despite living in a place where no Jews had ever lived.
Rebecca Clarren:And those are instructive. Right? They're all teaching tools when you really think about the stories your elders tell you, I think. And that's what I'm being taught is how to be tough, how to stay connected to my family, how to prioritize our Judaism, and yet there was never really any stories about our neighbors who were Lakota, who they're living 13 I mean, the Cheyenne River Bridger was, like, 13 miles away from my family's ranch. It's really not far.
Rebecca Clarren:Especially before the Cheyenne River was damned. People would go back and forth across the river all the time. And there there are these mysterious photographs of my ancestors posing at roadsides or even in a studio with people wearing Lakota and Dakota garb, and and those were also very mysterious to me. So I wanted to understand part of writing this book was to try and understand how were we benefiting and and why weren't we telling those stories and what what was going on. Does that answer your question?
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:It it does because it it it amounts to the curiosity of how your family met the native peoples of Lakota in that part of southwest section of Cheyenne River in being closely tied with Rapid City and Phillip, other small places that you had to access, you know, food and supplies to to come back and almost resettle every time you come back to be a settler. You had to go away to get supplies to to survive it, and yet the land was was all that was not all that forgiving. And I'm wondering how do you make it? And you you you also mentioned, you know, for every benefit that your family received or got from the government, there was also the unknown taking from the Lakota people in order that other people, including Jewish people, survive in in not knowing, except now your your family is beginning to experience the knowing.
Rebecca Clarren:Yes. They are because of my research, and and, I mean, I think it's important to point out that there was this place called Jew Flats that locals to this day still call Jew Flats even though no Jew has lived there for a very long time. But that based on my research, my understanding is that there were about a 1000 homesteaders that were Jewish in the Dakotas, but really that's about a half of 1% of all of the homesteaders that were in the Dakota. So, you know, there were plenty of immigrants and and many, many, many white people, but, Jews were a small part of that.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:And you're listening to an interview with Rebecca Claren, author of The Cost of Free Land. This is First Voices Radio. My name is Teokassen, Ghosthorse. Stay tuned. We'll be right back.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Do you hear No more doubt. No more fear. There's a new day it's bring Something simple is the key. It's so far. It's so Almost close.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Almost And that's a love theme from Spartacus by Terry Collier. And we begin the second half with story with Rebecca Claren here on First Forces Radio. Thanks for joining us again. Of a Lakota family offering white settlers who arrived at their home, quote, unquote, being fed and asked, where are you going by the Lakota? And the reply by the white family with their wagons and supplies and everything said, here, this is our land now.
Rebecca Clarren:This was a story that I had heard. I had heard this story. I mean, it's sort of almost like, is this a real story? But I've heard it so many times and read it that it I think it was in the early post allotment as the reservations themselves are being opened up. So my family's land is land that had be begun belonged to the Lakota under the 18/68 treaty and was siphoned away in the 18/80 9 agreement allotment agreement.
Rebecca Clarren:And as you know, and many of your listeners, of course, know that then those reservations end up getting spliced and diced and given to more settlers. And my family doesn't take that land, doesn't get in on that, those bits of land that are what is today still on Staining Rock and Cheyenne River. But, yes, there were so many stories I heard of of these people, of settlers showing up in their wagons and they're on the reservation, and here they are. They're they're home now. And that's and what explains the patchwork nature of land ownership still to this day in those places.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:And your ancestor meeting with a Minikozho John Whitepool, and then later on in your lifetime meeting, Douglas Whitepool?
Rebecca Clarren:So I have this photograph that, was, again, very mysterious, and it's of my great great uncle Jack Sineken. He was my great grandmother's older brother shaking hands with this man who's dressed in, like, full regalia. He has a war bonnet and a pipe and a pipe bag, and there's it's taken in a studio. And we we always called this person that was in the photo. They they my family said, oh, that's Red Cloud, and you don't have to do any real research to recognize this is not Red Cloud.
Rebecca Clarren:You can tell right away. And on my first trip to do research for this project, which was in early 2019, tribal historians told me in both both a couple different reservations that I visited that we think this is Joseph Weipel, who, as you know, was Sitting Bull's nephew. And there was a whole book written about him in the thirties, by Stanley Vestal called Warpath. And because I had written a series of stories that had run-in the nation in Indian country today, in 2017 and 2018 about native nations, I had people that trusted me, I guess, is the easiest way to say it, that believed in my work. And so one of those people, he used to be married into the White Wolf family.
Rebecca Clarren:And so I had reached out to him telling him about this picture. He said, oh, I I know the white bulls, and he introduced me. And I and my cousin in I think it was June of 2019, we came to Standing Rock. And when we first show up at the elder housing, Doug White Bull, who was this is beloved former teacher and coach in Lakota country. He said, I am the oldest living descendant of the man in that photograph.
Rebecca Clarren:So I know there is, like, a lot because of cultural interruption. It's hard to know. There are many the majority of family members, the majority of tribal historians say this is Joseph Weibel. But as I write in the endnotes, you know, it might not be. It's it's not like we ever found the exact studio or there it could it looks a lot like him, but it could be someone else.
Rebecca Clarren:I I identified based on the clothes that my uncle Jack is wearing. I have another photograph that he took of himself and my grandmother that was from 2019, and he's wearing the same suit. So I think it's from around 2019, but it's you know, this is all hard to say, but I love I found this there's a historian who writes a lot about photography, and she talks about how we like to think that because there's a photograph of something, it's really meaningful, when in fact, what's true is that photographs lead us to stories. They are not necessarily the story. And I I feel that that photograph led me to know the white bull family, and knowing them has changed my life, really.
Rebecca Clarren:I mean, it it's changed their stories and so many, many, many hours I've spent talking to elder Doug Weipel, and he's he's a teacher. He loves history. I've learned so much from him, and it's changed the way I think about my own history and American history. So I'm grateful for that.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:More about your family, and I'm always understanding how the Lakota reacted to seeing in the, like, in the thirties, maybe earlier for your family, those who failed, as you quote, were key to the success of the settlers who stayed.
Rebecca Clarren:Right. So all these people, as we know, the Great Depression happens. Settlers don't know how to take care of the land in the way that Lakota have been taking care of the land forever, And so the topsoil drifts away. So many people are going belly up. There's, like, rows and rows of bankruptcy notices in the local papers.
Rebecca Clarren:People die by suicide because they're so embarrassed that they have not been able to make it. But as these people leave, and many of them literally just walk away from the land with whatever they have left, they leave behind claim shacks. They leave behind hay. They leave behind horses, and the people who stay take that over. And there I believe tell me if I'm wrong, but I think I'm remembering this correctly, but there was a law that you could just pay the back taxes of that land and it would then be yours.
Rebecca Clarren:And so a lot of settlers expand including my own family, expand their land holdings by doing that at that time. So even though the homesteading experiment is not going well for very many of the homesteaders, that doesn't increase and it doesn't shift the scales to help native people. You know? It still is land that stays away, cut out of native ownership at that point or living with that land again.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Interesting because I'm overlapping a little bit about history that, you know, there was a thing that you mentioned here, the forced land fee patents. If you went to war, you came back defending the nation, then you were more deemed to be a a good citizen and you were handed a a patent that you could actually own land and the process was?
Rebecca Clarren:It was one of the most shocking things I learned, and I learned a lot of things that shocked me in my research. But, yes, that there was this idea that land under the allotment act is being held in trust by so the United States and Bureau of Land Management or the Indian Agency, they hold the land in trust, and they're holding all the money that comes in off land for native people. And, again, there's this effort. How do we get I mean, again, some of them are true believers. Some of them are just wanting the land, capitalists.
Rebecca Clarren:And so there's this change that happens in the early 20th century where there's this idea, well, people who are assimilated enough native people are assimilated enough, they can become private property owners. And there's even this weird ceremony that gets written. There's a ritual that gets written by the department the head of the interior who who sort of links citizenship, which native people at the time don't have. They're not American citizens, and they're not able to have the rights that citizenship entails. And but there's the sense if you if you take your private property and take your land out of trust and have it as then you can be a citizen.
Rebecca Clarren:So that's all happening. For some people, they're not voluntarily wanting their land to be put in in private property because for many of them, they know that then they have to start paying taxes on the land. It's also maybe culturally not something that is familiar to them, but they don't have a choice. Indian agents and the and the superior and agency's superior people will come in and say, well, this person looks pretty white, and that could be literally that they cut their hair, that they're they had, like, a more I mean, it could be something as simple as, like, their house was very clean and they kept they had they were able to sort of track their money. And then those people's land were put in what was called forced fee fee patent where against their will, their land's made into private property.
Rebecca Clarren:And, yes, getting back to your point, all these all these men go off to fight and defend America in World War 1. And while they're away, because they are soldiers, the Indian agents and so our supervisors decide, oh, well, they they're really assimilated. Look at them. And they put their land in force v patent. And while they're gone, the county starts taxing their land.
Rebecca Clarren:Well, they don't know their land's been put in taxes. They're they're in some terrible circumstance in the front fighting for their lives, and all of these tax bills pile up at the door, and then the counties just takes the land because the taxes haven't been paid. And then that land can then be put up for auction and sold to the low to the highest bidder to whoever wants it, which is almost always a non native person. And this happens to many, many people, and I found discussion of it in the congressional record actually noting it. And at the same time that they discussed that this happened, and it happened the most commonly in the Dakotas this happens, to native people, they say there's nothing we can do for this.
Rebecca Clarren:This has never been attended to by the United States, this atrocious thing that was done to veterans.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Leading up to, of course, the ceremony that you described as a ritual, Basically, you said that you have shot your last arrow. You're now now no long you are no longer to live the life of an Indian. You're gonna stay forward to live the life of the white man. And, touching their hand to the plow, this act meant that you have chosen to live the life of the white man, and the white man lives by work. And I go forward here that the women were given purses to keep the money, save the money, become good capitalists, that held hands with democracy.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:And this is this is, to me, we are granted citizenship and that we were free and equal to white brothers, that we could vote, manage our own land and money, and newly made citizens were free to sell this land and that comes with the swindling that moves into the 19 thirties. And you just I think it's 90% of the the the native people have lost their lands by then, according to this rule and even even degree of blood, was just beginning.
Rebecca Clarren:Right. They also passed these laws that say if you have 51 or even they changed the law. If you have 50% non native blood, then your land is automatically put into force v patent as well, and the land is private property. And and, yeah, I can't think of it. You might have it there in front of you more than I do, but it was this insanely large number of people who, once their land was put in private property, they lose their land.
Rebecca Clarren:And the United States knows this is happening. I dug through tens of thousands of pages of these reports that the Indian agents would write every year to their supervisors at the Indian agency back in DC. They know this is happening. They're writing about it. They're telling it.
Rebecca Clarren:And it was fascinating to see how some of them would sort of spin this as good news, saying, oh, well, they're losing their land, but that's teaching them an important American value of hard work, which is, yeah.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:I love the words that you described as simulated or assimilation rituals that your family is that they also needed to change their names as needed people who had said, If you use a white name, then you're more adapt to receive conversation or privilege. So a lot of native people changed their names into white names, American names, that coupled with the the the Christianity that came in the religions and the government and how to get along just to get along.
Rebecca Clarren:At no point did my family need to change their name or braid their last challah to get to become an American citizen. No one's asking that of us.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:So then comes the thirties, and I don't know we're getting close to time here. But I just wanted to give you this one story of a great great grandmother that I had. Her name was Annie Swipeagle. And, she was part of the Fool Soldiers Band. I don't know if you had heard about that.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Fool Soldiers were a group of Lakota people who went out to save a wagon train in the middle of winter, from also being attacked, right, by some angry native people. So they saved this wagon train of white folks and brought to the reservation. And and, some of the some of the natives were actually killed by the same wagon train that they saved. And so Annie Swipeagle was father was given a gold medal, a medal of honor for saving this wagon train and, as a civilized citizen. But once they were given this forced deed, land fee fee patent, they also accumulated back taxes.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:And it went on for a good 20 years or so until citizenship. But up until that time, they owed so much that she had to take her father's gold medal and sell it to pay the back taxes. So that that's
Rebecca Clarren:Wow.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:That's one I know. We're we my family is also from the western part of Cheyenne River as well as the eastern part of Cheyenne River. And so that that is one I want to say that seems to is to swindling the the the ways of how to get more land continues to this day to put us on a worse land and yet it's so precious underneath. But it's not what what that is in value of the native people. It's more about how we're treating the land.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Because if we take care of the land again, it'll it will take care of us. But there's so much to read here and tell about. Is there something that I could skip ahead to and, you know, they get so much content. I'd like to have, like, 20 pages of notes right here. Just take
Rebecca Clarren:a look. That is so amazing. Oh, I love seeing that. Thank you for showing me. I mean, I think one thing I'll share is that, to me, after spending time with Lakota elders and also spending time really understanding my own Jewish tradition, I changed the way I think about history and time.
Rebecca Clarren:I think I grew up having an American education and thinking we're walking away from the past. It's behind us. It lives almost in a box. And now I think of history as, like, connected to this moment, like, thread through a scene. And so it was very important to me to not just write this history as if it doesn't have anything to do with today, but to show the legacy this history has left.
Rebecca Clarren:And so the book toggles back and forth between the past and the contemporary moment, trying to show the links between those 2. And so the final chapter, the epilogue is called an American inheritance. And it's all about kind of in a real way, the systemic racism that exists in the Dakotas, which I really relate to some sort of cycle of the failure to teach the history of native people, the Lakota in particular, in its full complexity, which leads to more racism, which leads to us kind of failing to do anything about the past, we as a society. I really see those things as all being connected, and I try and write about them all in that epilogue. And I also I spent a lot of time doing something I've never done before as a journalist, which was really grappling with, well, how do you respond to what you're writing about?
Rebecca Clarren:And so I thought a lot about, well, what can we as descendants of settlers do about the past now? How do we start to try and step towards some sort of healing and repair? So so those thoughts are also in the book throughout.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:Your friend, Judge Abby.
Rebecca Clarren:Judge Abby Avenatti. Yes. She's Yurok elder and judge. Yeah.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:She said, I'm a quote her, if we keep if we keep secrets, we don't understand the past. And so we don't have the opportunity to take to take responsibility and share the fault. Your thoughts on that closing statement.
Rebecca Clarren:Like almost everything Judge has taught me, I I love what she has to say. I I think it's so true. I think if we don't know about the past, if we don't teach it to our children, then there's no way to heal. And, I mean, that's what many Lakota elders told me is let's start there with more truth telling. And I think that's true.
Rebecca Clarren:And I I know there's a lot of conversation about things like critical race theory, and we don't want our kids to feel bad. And I guess I just will say that I have kids, and I talk about this history with them. And they don't feel bad, like they've done something wrong or that their history isn't something that they should also be proud of. I think children and humans are able to hold many complicated ideas at the same time, and they can both feel proud that their family figured out how to survive in a drought stricken hard climate and place and become farmers and have success. And they can also understand how that benefit that we received came at great cost to others, and they can start to be a part of something different and and take responsibility in a in a hopefully helpful way that follows the lead of, you know, native voices and the work that is happening at a slow pace, but I do think is happening in America.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:It's such an honor to have you here, Rebecca Claren, and thank you for writing this book, The Cost of Freeland. Thank you so much, Rebecca, for being here. And I hope this interview was good for you as it was good for me.
Rebecca Clarren:It was. I'm really grateful. Thank you so so much for having me. It's been really such an honor and really fun. So thank you.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse:And you can find out more at Rebecca Claren and the book, the cost of free land at Rebecca hyphenclaren.com. That's rebecca hyphenclarren.com or go to Rebecca Claren on Twitter and Instagram. I'd like to thank you for joining us here on First Forces Radio, Doksha Ake watching. See you next time. I'm Tiokasin, ghost horse.
