The Cost of Free Land: An Interview with Rebecca Clarren

Join journalist and poet Rebecca Clarren in a discussion about her award-winning book The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance. A blend of investigative reporting and memoir, the book is the entangled history of her Jewish homesteading ancestors on the South Dakota prairie and their Lakota neighbors. The book not only reveals how federal policies that helped her family came at great harm to Native Americans, but it invites the reader to join Clarren in grappling with how those of us who have benefited from the amoral past might step towards repair. Award-winning journalist and poet Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the American West for more than twenty-five years. Her book The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance (Viking/Penguin) won, among a number of honors, an Oregon Book Award, a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant and was named a Best Book of 2023 by Kirkus Reviews. She’s currently working on The Dispossessed, a work of lyric biography. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.