[A new book explores the opportunity Jewish immigrants found on
the South Dakota prairie — and what it cost Native Americans. ]
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JEWS, LAKOTA AND AN AMERICAN INHERITANCE  
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Rebecca Clarren
September 29, 2023
Politico
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_ A new book explores the opportunity Jewish immigrants found on the
South Dakota prairie — and what it cost Native Americans. _

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_From _THE COST OF FREE LAND
[[link removed]]_ by
Rebecca Clarren, to be published on October 3, 2023 by Viking, an
imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC. Copyright (C) 2023 by Rebecca Clarren._

I grew up looking at mysterious, never-explained photographs of my
Jewish ancestors posing in studios or on roadsides with Indigenous
people in South Dakota, not far from my family’s ranch. In one
sepia-tone picture, my great-great-uncle Jack, his gun holstered on
the outside of his suit jacket, shakes hands with an Indigenous man
wearing a war bonnet and holding a beaded bag and pipe. My relatives
always identified this man — inaccurately it would turn out — as
Chief Red Cloud. That we were related to someone who knew a famous
chief was a source of pride, but not of curiosity. Though my ancestors
lived near several reservations, I heard no handed-down stories about
the Lakota and our relatives.

I grew up looking at mysterious, never-explained photographs of my
Jewish ancestors posing in studios or on roadsides with Indigenous
people in South Dakota, not far from my family’s ranch. In one
sepia-tone picture, my great-great-uncle Jack, his gun holstered on
the outside of his suit jacket, shakes hands with an Indigenous man
wearing a war bonnet and holding a beaded bag and pipe. My relatives
always identified this man — inaccurately it would turn out — as
Chief Red Cloud. That we were related to someone who knew a famous
chief was a source of pride, but not of curiosity. Though my ancestors
lived near several reservations, I heard no handed-down stories about
the Lakota and our relatives.

Instead, my family passed on stories that telegraphed tenacity and
toughness. My great-great grandparents, Faige Etke and Harry Sinykin,
joined a wave of Jews fleeing antisemitism and oppression in Russia at
the turn of the 20th century. Like many other immigrants at the time,
they received free land from the U.S. government after arriving in
America: a 160-acre homestead that was theirs to keep if they could
tame the wild prairie into farmland. So many Jewish immigrants settled
in this one slice of the South Dakota prairie that some locals still
call the area “Jew Flats.” Life on the prairie was hard and
strange. They chopped holes in frozen creeks to take mikvahs, burned
dried buffalo dung for warmth during the cruel winters and dodged
rattlesnakes on the path to the outhouse. I grew up marveling at these
stories, hoping that they meant something about me, that I too might
have grit.

It took me a long time to realize that there was white space at the
margins of these narratives. Because while the stories we tell create
the myths we pass down to future generations, so do the stories we
don’t_ _tell — such as the silence surrounding photographs like
the one of my great-great uncle and the Lakota man.

I have spent almost my entire adult life reporting on the American
West, attempting to write articles that expand our fixed ideas about
the region. Yet, when it came to my own ancestors’ history on the
South Dakota prairie, I maintained a blind spot. Only after years of
reporting in Indigenous communities did it dawn on me that my family,
that I myself, had benefitted from centuries of federal mistreatment
of Indigenous people in the United States.

Finally curious about what had happened a century ago on the South
Dakota prairie, in 2018 I began research for what would eventually
become my book, _The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and An American
Inheritance_
[[link removed]].
On visits to both Jew Flats and nearby Lakota reservations, I carried
those mysterious photographs with me. What I would learn over the
coming years would change the way I understood my family, America and
my place in this country.

How to atone for historic wrongs — both as a nation and as
individuals — has become a pivotal topic of debate in American
politics. We don’t agree about reparations policies. We don’t
agree about affirmative action. We don’t even agree about teaching
the truth of our nation’s history in schools. As a journalist, my
job has been to expose issues, to bring them into the cold light of
day — not to provide solutions. But I would find repeatedly while
working on _The Cost of Free Land_ that my family’s personal
narrative was inextricable from America’s collective history. How to
move forward in a way that included the past was no longer a question
I could ignore.

THE ROLLING HILLS AND GRASS sea of Jew Flats was “a place like the
End of the World,” my great-great-aunt Rose, who grew up there,
wrote years later. “Twenty-five miles from a railroad station, seven
miles from a post office, three and a half miles from any
neighbors.” Here, 13 miles from the southeast corner of the Cheyenne
River Sioux Tribe Reservation, around 30 Jewish families homesteaded
some 7,000 non-contiguous acres within a span of 44 square miles on
former Lakota land. (By this point, the United States had taken
approximately 98 percent of the land reserved for the Lakota by a
treaty in 1851 and given it to white settlers and railroad companies.)

By 1912, four years after my ancestors sowed their first crop, there
were an estimated 25,000 Jewish farmers in 46 states. More than 70
Jewish farm communities, composed of anywhere from a few dozen to
2,500 people, had been established in the United States — many in
the West, many on formerly Native American lands. In the Dakotas, an
estimated 1,000 Jews were homesteaders like the Sinykins. (Keep in
mind, they represented a sliver of Dakota settlers, estimated at less
than 0.5 percent.) Though their lives were certainly freer than those
of Jews under constant threat in Eastern Europe, by no means were
their lives easy.

That first winter that my ancestors arrived, they lived in a house
made of dirt, its walls the cut bank of a hill, with roots and grass
jutting from the roof. When it rained, it rained through a hole in the
roof made for the stove pipe, and the floor liquified to mud. These
sod houses were dark and smelled, I can only imagine, like bong water.
A hole in the ground under a board on the floor served as both a
“refrigerator” and a place to hide from the not-infrequent
tornados. A cave in the back housed their animals. The temperature
could swing 50 degrees in one day. At night, it was so cold that they
could lie in bed, dressed in layers of clothing, and watch their
breath freeze on their blankets.

The Sinykin’s 160 acres were free, but only if they could, under the
rules of the Homestead Act, “improve” upon them by building a
house and planting at least 10 acres within three years. My ancestors
planted corn and wheat, but soon enough realized what the Lakota had
known for years — that farming in this dry, unirrigated place was
nearly impossible, especially during periods of drought. During
several seasons in their early years on the prairie, it didn’t rain
for an entire year; the best crops were prairie dogs, rattlesnakes and
Russian thistle. One farmer in the country remembered that it was
“so dry you couldn’t see a spear of grass.” The Sinykins lost
their entire crop two years in a row.

Even though their lives were hard, the dominant family narrative is
that “they loved it. They always called it ‘the Good Earth,’”
says my great-aunt Etta Orkin, our 90-year-old family matriarch.
“Their lives were so much narrower in Russia, and I think they were
so happy to be free to be able to go and come and do. Owning [land]
made them feel they were a part of America, that they lived in a free
country.”

But in fact, that freedom came at great cost to my family’s Lakota
neighbors.

IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE Civil War, the United States was bent on
seeding the northern plains with white people who would support, just
by being there, a transcontinental railroad linking the new state of
California, and its abundant natural resources, to the rest of the
country. Standing in the way of this vision were millions of buffalo
and tens of thousands of Native Americans whose leaders had signed
legal agreements with Congress reserving Indigenous rights to the
land. So, promises made became promises broken.

By 1908, when my family was planting their first crop on their South
Dakota homestead, the United States had diminished Lakota lands by 98
percent in less than 60 years. In an effort to further diminish Native
property, Congress had enacted policies of cultural genocide, aiming
to assimilate Native people to the point that their economy, culture
and religion were no longer tied to land.

What I didn’t know growing up was that the stories about my
ancestors on the prairie failed to acknowledge the systematic benefits
the federal government extended to us because we weren’t Indigenous
but white — at least, white enough. Not only were harms imposed upon
those living on reservations, freedoms were extended to those outside
the reservations, creating inequity in two directions.

Unlike their Lakota neighbors, who were at risk of being jailed for
practicing their ceremonies and religion, the Jews of Jew Flats were
free to worship how they liked. Unlike their Lakota neighbors, whose
children were regularly taken from their communities for nine months
at a stretch to be assimilated at federal schools, the Sinykins were
free to educate their children however they wanted. Unlike the Lakota,
whom the Indian Agents tried to keep from farming or ranching in
family groups with the intention of breaking apart traditional
communal culture, the Sinykins and their cousins and friends survived
by collective effort, unbothered by government interference. Unlike
the Lakota, whose marriages and divorces were regulated by federal
representatives, the Jews of Jew Flats could marry whomever they
wanted. Unlike the Lakota, who were denied citizenship, which
prevented them from voting and accessing a slew of rights, immigrant
citizens (at least the men) could vote even when they couldn’t speak
or read English. And unlike most Lakota, who couldn’t get a bank
account or handle their own money, let alone leave the reservation to
pursue jobs elsewhere, the Jews of Jew Flats could and did leverage
the worth of their land for a mortgage or bank loan.

To look at only one piece of this history is to ignore the depths of
this unfairness.

ON A SUMMER DAY in 2019, I knocked on a low-slung house on the
Standing Rock Reservation, holding that photo of my Uncle Jack shaking
hands with that man wearing Lakota regalia. Earlier visits to the
Dakotas and interviews with Native historians had led me to believe
that the man in the picture was Joseph White Bull, the nephew of
Sitting Bull and a chief of the Mnicoujou Lakota. Now, the picture had
led me to Doug White Bull, an elder who described himself as “my
Grandpa Joe’s oldest living descendant.”

Doug had never seen such a picture before. Neither had any of his
nieces, nephews or kids whom I interviewed. I searched for years to
figure out why these two men might have taken this picture, visiting
museums of all sizes, searching archives and speaking with elders and
tribal historians. I heard many theories, including one that this
wasn’t even Joseph White Bull, but I never solved the mystery.

When I started this project, I thought that, by understanding this
picture, I could collapse the line between the past and today. I
thought I might learn that it was Joseph’s ancestors who dropped the
arrowheads my cousins found on Jew Flats. This longing, more than
anything else, reveals my old ideas about land ownership, about the
colonialism that has shaped me. Now I understand that photographs
don’t tell stories. Photographs lead us to stories. Not having
solved the mystery of this picture doesn’t matter as much to me
anymore. The fact that their lives intersected at all has led me to
know Doug White Bull and his relatives, whose insights and stories
have changed the way I understand both American history and my own.
When I look at this picture now, I see the world beyond the frame. I
see the forces pushing both men to assimilate and pulling them apart.
I see the thread linking both of their lives to mine.

As my research revealed all the myriad ways that my family benefited
from policies that harmed Native Americans, I kept returning to the
question of how much my ancestors knew about what was happening to
their neighbors on the nearby reservations. Were the Sinykins aware of
the persecution being done in this land of the free?

By 1908, the United States decided to allow white settlers to move
onto Lakota reservations, further diminishing Native land. Newspapers
published throughout western South Dakota between 1908 and 1911, the
exact period during which my family was settling on the prairie,
reported that Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Lakota didn’t want
their reservations opened to non-Native settlement, and that they had
signed treaties protecting these lands as their property. Despite this
awareness, white ranchers urged public officials to open the
reservations to them, justifying themselves in a way that exposed the
racism at the heart of life on the plains.

As my research revealed all the myriad ways that my family benefited
from policies that harmed Native Americans, I kept returning to the
question of how much my ancestors knew about what was happening to
their neighbors on the nearby reservations. Were the Sinykins aware of
the persecution being done in this land of the free?

By 1908, the United States decided to allow white settlers to move
onto Lakota reservations, further diminishing Native land. Newspapers
published throughout western South Dakota between 1908 and 1911, the
exact period during which my family was settling on the prairie,
reported that Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Lakota didn’t want
their reservations opened to non-Native settlement, and that they had
signed treaties protecting these lands as their property. Despite this
awareness, white ranchers urged public officials to open the
reservations to them, justifying themselves in a way that exposed the
racism at the heart of life on the plains.

“What do you expect of people who survived genocidal attacks but to
survive, for God’s sake? When someone is fleeing for their life, if
you’re on a dead run, you’re not stopping to have a
restorative-justice conversation or question why you’re being
helped.”

It’s now the job, she gently reminds me, of my generation, those of
us who have grown up free of such upheaval, to do the work of
considering the harms of this entangled history. According to
Abinanti, justice works best when grounded in one’s own culture. She
suggested that I study Jewish teachings about repair and healing for
guidance about how to move forward. Fortunately, I didn’t have to do
this alone.

Over the course of the following three years, I met regularly with my
rabbi, Benjamin Barnett, to study ancient Jewish texts and the
writings of contemporary rabbis for direction on how to repair after a
harm has been committed, even and especially one that you didn’t
commit directly but that you benefit from. I would begin to realize
that truth-telling is critical to a repentance process, but its only
one step of many needed to truly repair.

After many years of conversations with both Lakota elders such as Doug
White Bull and Jewish leaders, I came to realize that simply telling
the truth about the past, working to debunk long-held American myths
as I do in _The Cost of Free Land_, was important, but not enough.
Guided by Doug and others, I and my family have created a fund with
the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, a Native-led non-profit, that has
been working for years to help Native Nations buy back their stolen
lands [[link removed]]. (We sold the last piece of our family ranch
on Jew Flats to other white ranchers in 1970.) Reparation economics is
a developing field, and by no means is my family’s effort a
definitive solution. It is just one of many happening throughout the
country that aim to reconcile the benefits the United States has
extended to those of us who are non-Indigenous at great cost and harm
to Native people.

These efforts are complicated by the fact that we in America have a
vacuum of federal leadership around how to consider the ways public
policy and law have hurt Native Nations. However, if enough citizens
lead by example, it’s possible Congress could be spurred to act.
This happened in Australia in the late 1990s, when activists there
created “Sorry Books” — available in public spaces such as
libraries, churches and schools — that provided settler descendants
the opportunity to apologize to the Indigenous people of Australia
when their government refused to do so. The books were so popular that
more than half a million people signed them, inspiring other
grassroots projects and activism that eventually pushed the Australian
government to take real action.

Ultimately, I hope that readers of _The Cost of Free Land_ will be
inspired to find themselves in this American story of the
dispossession of Indigenous lands. To help, I’ve collected the
resources that were helpful to me
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I set out to attempt to untangle this complicated history. Because no
matter when your family arrived in this country, all of us who
aren’t Indigenous benefit from the fact that our country was built
on the unfair taking and sometimes outright theft of Native lands.
Broken treaties cleared the way for the foundation of our highway
systems, our cities and our industrial agriculture. The sale and
leasing of former Native lands funded public universities that have
offered low-cost tuition to millions of Americans. Many of us have
access to cheap power from hydroelectric dams that flooded Indigenous
lands. Throughout its history, up to this moment, the United States
has made choices to benefit settlers and their descendants at the
detriment of Native Americans. This is our inheritance. What we do
about it now is the question.

_Rebecca Clarren is an investigative reporter and the author of The
Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance
[[link removed]],
from which this article was adapted._

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