How does a family of Jewish homesteaders interact with the indigenous people of the Great Plains? Journalist Rebecca Clarren explains how her family immigrated from Russia to South Dakota, lured by the promise of free land and how generations later she writes how it came at the expense of the Lakota. This book might grapple with the past, but it is not hard to find the contemporary relevance.
Essential Reading:
Rebecca Clarren, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance (2023).
Recommended Reading:
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020).
Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (2019).
Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023).
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