Rebecca Clarren

Rebecca Clarren

Rebecca Clarren is an award-winning journalist and novelist. Her latest book, “The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance” was named a Best Book of 2023 by Kirkus Reviews, The Forward and the Tribal College Journal. The Boston Globe called it "a monumental piece of work." It won a Whiting Non-Fiction Grant and a Will Rogers Medallion Award. It was also a finalist for the Great Plains Book Award, the High Plains Book Award, and Stanford's Saroyan Prize. Rebecca lives in Portland, OR, with her family.

The author's Great-Great-Uncle Louie Sinykin posing with men in Dakota garb in South Dakota's Black Hills. Date unknown.
Native American issues

The Cost of Free Land

Rebecca Clarren
When I was a child growing up in the 1980s, the story I learned about Thanksgiving followed the classic script: it highlighted amity between the Pilgrims and their Indigenous neighbors. Due to this connection, the hunger of the European settlers was met with squash and turkey.