The Cost of Free Land

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. The lesson was something about how America has always been a place where people from different cultures can count on one another. Also, there were funny hats.

We now know that the Thanksgiving story many of us learned as children traffics in myth more than fact. Ancient Jewish teachings implore us to do our part to make the world a more just and equitable place, and that one step of addressing harm is telling the truth. Thanksgiving offers us the opportunity to revisit our nation's tired narratives, shake them out by the pockets, and, using the fallen crumbs, forge a more complex and factual version of American history.

As I describe in "The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and An American Inheritance," the history of America's treatment of its Indigenous denizens is one of broken treaties, land theft, dispossession, and massacres. Throughout the 19^th and into the 20^th century, Congress passed laws and approved policy that made Indigenous religions and cultures illegal. To practice their rituals or traditions could lead to time served in jail. In an attempt to further diminish Indigenous connection to land (and make it easier to take Indigenous land), the United States required all Indigenous children to attend federal boarding schools, many of which were deliberately located far from Indigenous communities. One school founder famously said these schools would, "kill the Indian in him and save the man." Recent investigations by the Department of the Interior have uncovered mass graves at many of these schools, proof of the maltreatment and dehumanizing abuse that Indigenous elders have been trying to raise awareness about for decades.

When my ancestors arrived in America in the early 1900s to escape oppression in Russia, the United States gave them free land on the South Dakota prairie, a federal homestead of 160 acres that was theirs to keep if they could "improve" the land by turning it into a farm. My family hadn't been allowed to own land in Russia due to their being Jewish. Owning a piece of the American prairie made them feel more free, they told their children. My great-grandmother and her sister Rose called their ranch in South Dakota "the good earth." By leveraging the land to take out mortgages, they were able to prosper and pave a way to the middle class and beyond for themselves and their families.

Relatively few Jews homesteaded like my ancestors (Jewish homesteaders in the Dakotas made up less than .5 percent of total homesteaders in the region). Yet, no matter who you are or how your family arrived in America, all of us who are non-Indigenous and living in America today are benefitting from stolen land and broken treaties.

The real estate the United States took from Indigenous Nations is the foundation of our cities, our highway systems, our railroad lines, and our industrial agriculture. Many of us have access to cheap power from hydroelectric dams that flooded Indigenous lands or other sources of energy that polluted the air, water, and land of reservations. The sale and leasing of Indigenous lands funded public universities that have offered low-cost tuition to millions of Americans.

There's a story in the Talmud that discusses what should happen if it's discovered that a house, even a palace, was built with a stolen beam as part of its foundation. One rabbi argues that the entire building must be demolished so that the beam can be returned to its original owners. The other rabbi says the beam can remain if its value is repaid. Both rabbis make clear that once those living in the house know what happened, they must do something to make amends.

"Our country was built on a stolen beam," Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR famously said in a 2017 sermon. To ignore this history and its legacy is to perpetuate harm.

Jews have suffered from antisemitism, exile, displacement, and attempted genocide for generations. But this reality of oppression doesn't mean we can't also be part of oppressive systems. Discovering the ways you and your family have benefitted from the taking of Indigenous land is a good first step towards combatting myths like the one we celebrate on Thanksgiving. I've learned from Indigenous elders that we should attempt to live as good ancestors, meaning that we don't want to pass shameand mess down to our children and grandchildren. We can begin preventing such a harmful inheritance today by attending to the history and harm of our nation's treatment of Indigenous Americans.