Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance

https://portside.org/2023-10-09/jews-lakota-and-american-inheritance
Portside Date:
Author: Rebecca Clarren
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Politico

From THE COST OF FREE LAND 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. 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.


Source URL: https://portside.org/2023-10-09/jews-lakota-and-american-inheritance