Rebecca: it's just about knowing each other and knowing what each other needs and it's about how do we be good ancestors?
Chrissie: folks who have been systematically marginalized, systematically oppressed, the pain story becomes the story, right? And then we forget to tell the stories of black joy, stories of native joy. Those stories are just as inherent and important.
Rebecca: Humans make mistakes. How do we, instead of beating our chest, feeling guilt and shame, just acknowledge I'm human. I made a mistake and now how to atone, not only for myself and for the person I've harmed, but there's this learning that if we don't attend to those harms, they get passed on.
Chrissie: You're listening to Solving for Joy. I'm your host, Dr. Chrissie Ott.
Hello and welcome to this episode of the solving for joy podcast. I am so excited to be with my dear friend and celebrated author, Rebecca Clarren,, uh, who has the book, the cost of free land, which has just been so tremendous. Becca, welcome.
Rebecca: Thank you for having me. This is so nice to be here.
Chrissie: I am so excited that you're here. Um, I have this habit and, and I quite like it of just like starting with how we know each other. And I am aware that your kiddo just had their B'nai Mitzvah, which I just learned is a gender neutral bar slash Bah Mitzvah, and we met. a little over 13 years ago for the first time because you were expecting and I got to be your pediatrician.
Rebecca: You are the greatest pediatrician. Yes. That's amazing. Can you believe that tiny, tiny person is now like five, nine, five, eight, and just read from the Torah for the first time. It blows my mind.
Chrissie: I'm so thrilled a fantastic 13 year old human. Um, what was it like to go through this rite of passage as the parent of someone being Bar Mitzvahed, B'nai Mitzvahed?
Rebecca: It was totally amazing. I felt really like dedicated to being present through the whole ceremony, which is the two hour ceremony. And it occurred to me as we had invited all of these friends, my younger kid is 10, there were young kids there, my niece and nephew who were like, you know, my nephew is only four. Like, there were young people there, and that's a long time. That's a longer ritual than we expect people to, like, a bris is not that long. A wedding is never that long. Funerals, I just went to a funeral for my Aunt Etta two weeks ago. It was not that long. It's amazing to, like, ask people to show up like, come to a religious ceremony for a two hour thing with the promise of a bagel at the end. And they all Everyone was there, you and I also know each other, because not only were you an amazing pediatrician, our children ended up attending the same preschool. And there were many parents who we are still friends with from those preschool years, whose kids are very close to my kid. And apparently they just cried the whole time, which is, to me, always highest praise when you can make someone feel something and cry,
Chrissie: they were crying, not out of distress, but out of just having their hearts touched.
Rebecca: Yeah. And it was really just beautiful. I mean, what I said to my kid in advance was, I'm already proud of you. Like you already did what I hoped, which was to work very diligently and to take this seriously and to engage with your Torah portion and think critically about it. And it's cake, like whatever happens now is cake. And It was truly incredible to watch them shine and to be so held and embraced, not only by our community, but by be really in touch with the thousands of years of our ancestors who have led us to this moment. it was amazing. I definitely also have been thinking a lot about how American capitalism and our American culture has convinced so many of us that like there were all these individuals and we have capacities to achieve and to fail as individuals and how much I don't agree with that anymore, partly through the work I've done with so many indigenous elders and Jewish leaders to see that other cultural models tell us what to me feels like such a deeper truth, which is that we're, in fact, totally connected that we are so apart and that the antidote to feeling despair in the face of like seemingly intractable political and historical wrongs is to actually see the way that the system has created this and that as a system, we can respond. And so in the moment of the bar mitzvah to also feel like I'm not raising this child alone. Everyone in this room is helping to raise a person who I think is a mensch, a good person and, um, who will continue to hold that and that we also in our heartbreak about the world and about recent deaths and illness in our parents are also held and connected by more than just ourselves.
Chrissie: Yes. So much. Yes. To that. Oh, I mean, the fact that it's a two hour long ceremony is just so, powerful to speaking to the importance of this particular rite of passage and how we, how we are bringing this young human into the larger um, family of humans and recognizing their fullness and their arrival. And to think that it's just about, you know, the external performative aspect, the, capitalistic, you know, familial performative aspect, which sometimes can be, and, you know, a draw, it's so beautiful to, deeply, deeply be immersed in the lineage of it and, you know, like just to bring more and more awareness to that is, it's so wonderful. And it's such a lovely point of transition because your Jewish heritage and identity are a huge part of, um, I'm sure your, your general life solving for joy, right? The complexity that joy can present. Yeah, and in this conversation. I am super excited to introduce listeners to the richness of The Cost of Free Land because I know that it's been it's been a labor of love In complexity for you for a long time.
Rebecca: Absolutely. Well, thank you for helping to spread the word about the book
Chrissie: Absolutely, so what I'm curious about is, like, as we thread through this conversation, how solving for joy played a role in your need to complete this creative act, this sort of full circle moment, this healing, um, because I think there must be many motivations and I'm curious about the, the one that you would perceive as relating to joy.
Rebecca: Oh my gosh, there's, it's on so many levels, honestly. So for people who don't know anything about my book, it is an entangled history. I've been calling this, this entangled history about
Chrissie: great word for it.
Rebecca: um, my Jewish, homesteading ancestors on the South Dakota Prairie and their Lakota neighbors. I've been a journalist writing about the American West for 25 years, and I've really felt like my job description has been, how do you take seemingly really boring policy and law and show how it plays out in the lives of families and communities and individuals in ways that are anything but boring. And so the story is the story of American land policy of the last 200 years. But also a story very specifically told in the story of my family and the Lakota family called the White Bulls, named the White Bull family.
Chrissie: That honestly nobody but you could have told. I mean, this is your story. It is really true that you showed up in this space with your very authentic connections to this heritage and unfolding of policy that came through your particular family. It's so powerful.
Rebecca: Thank you. There was this photograph that was taken between, um, well, it's very mysterious picture, but, but is a photo of my ancestor, my uncle Jack, and he's shaking hands with a man in full Lakota garb in a studio. It's a very, very rare kind of picture. And I searched so many archives and I could not find really any other photo even of its kind. Um, And the man early in my research, about six years ago, tribal historians at several of the Lakota reservation said, we think this is Joseph White Bull. And that's how I came to know the White Bull family.
But what led me to write the book was I had been hired to write a series of stories for an investigative reporting shop called Investigate West. The stories ran in the nation and Indian country today about how, you know, what's the state of Native nations today for individuals, for communities? And so this is a very long way to answer your question, which is like, how is solving for joy? That there was a moment when I was working on that series, it wasn't like an aha moment. It was sort of a slow dawning, realization that, oh, these stories, I'm not like an unbiased reporter here on the outside of what I'm writing about in these articles. These, this is my personal story. I am personally impacted. And I truly think at this point, having worked on this project all these years now, I see really anyone living in America today can find themselves in this history. This is all of our history and we just are taught myths that we are not, that it has happened in the past, that it isn't about today. So part of the solving for joy of the book in and of itself, although I'm sure I wouldn't have called it solving for joy initially, was to say, how do I not only tell a more honest, complicated, nuanced version of the truth than what I learned growing up, both in school and in my own family about these entangled histories between non Natives and Natives. And then also, how do we step towards this history in a way that both acknowledges it, grapples with it, tries to take some responsibility for it and move into the future in a more healed way, it's like so many of what happened in the past can never be truly healed. People were killed, children were taken from their families. It's like, You can't really ever, you can't heal those things.
Chrissie: No, maybe in a whole way, right. Where we haven't, um, excised the horrors that were part of the, you know, the truth, we can look at it more holistically.
Rebecca: Exactly. So there was this, like, there's a layer of the book, which is sort of how do we, and I think for people who read it, they see that I was guided by an indigenous judge, an elder judge, Abby Abinanti. She's chief justice of the Iraq nation. She's become a real mentor to me. She's, I'm so grateful to know her. We met cause I wrote a profile about her for the nation.
Chrissie: I'm so grateful to know of her based on the, the impact that she has had on you.
Rebecca: I mean, she said so many, I feel like everything she's ever said. I'm like, that's a whole book in and of itself, but when I wrote that article for the nation, I interviewed judges around the country who are really inspired by the way she runs
her
courtroom she was that are not non native and native. And 1 of them, a guy in Michigan. He said, you know, most of our courts. They solve for they're about getting even, judge Abby's courtroom is about getting well, and, and I really, I really love that. She has a very compassionate approach to justice. She's, she wants things to, you know, the crime to fit the specifics of what happened and the punishment and the reaction to fit that as well. And she said to me early on, listen, if you're going to retell these histories. You know, you really need to grapple, you need to step into it, and we know that justice works best in a cultural context, so you should really study the Jews. What do the Jews say about how to respond to a harm, even when you didn't directly commit, but when you benefited from. And that led me to then spend several years doing study with my rabbi here in Portland, Benjamin Barnett, and he, felt like early on that this learning would be useful to our whole community. So we did this form of study called Havruta, which is paired study.
Chrissie: I loved reading about this. I loved it.
Rebecca: Yeah and actually, at my kids bar mitzvah this last weekend, Rabbi Benjamin was talking about how there was these famous rabbis, Rabbi Yochanan And I can't remember the other rabbi who are really famous. They were like, kind of had like a love affair of studying together. And after one, Oh, Lakish, Rabbi Yochanan and Reb Lakish and when Reb Lakish died, it was so painful. And they replaced Reb Lakish. Some rabbis found a new study partner for Rabbi Yochanan. And the study partner basically was like a yes man for Rabbi Yochanan. He was just like, yes, you got it. And Rabbi Yochanan was like, This is not what I'm looking for. It was like, it doesn't, that the respectful pushing of one another is actually what he was longing for. And I am so grateful to rabbi Benjamin for that, for pushing me and for the arguments that, I mean, never really like heated arguments, but I, I am positive rabbi Benjamin learned virtually nothing from me, but I certainly learned so much from him.
Chrissie: I doubt that is true.
Rebecca: Oh, I don't know, but it was really, and, and, you know, what I will say is that I don't include in the book, everything we studied and learned, but the juiciest, most robust, most helpful ancient texts that are being interpreted by contemporary rabbis around this issue of how do we face our past and particularly the past that engages with native land theft in light of nameless dispossession, um, I, I thread those teachings through the book and they did really help me come to just like think about how my family might do a small response reparation and looking at other models of how we could as a, as community, small and large start to lean into this history.
Chrissie: I think that our culture underestimates the value of skillful amends making, and acknowledgment, because I think that if we are talking about our culture at a very, you know, macro level, uh, the, the personality of our culture has a pretty fragile ego still, you know, it's a little bit immature in that way. Um, but integrity demands that we acknowledge with some humility when we have missed the mark and, uh, miss the mark is like the most, uh, whitewashed, cleansed, um, version of horrifyingly massacred, um, created genocide, as we did on this continent, with our actions.
Rebecca: Well, absolutely. And, but I love that you use that word, miss the mark, because the Hebrew word for what is interpreted as sin is, is actually just the word hate or chet, depending how you pronounce it, which just is, it comes from an archery term, which really does just mean to miss the mark. And rabbi Benjamin and judge Abby have taught me again and again, you know, humans make mistakes. That's what we do. And so how do we, instead of beating our chest, feeling guilt and shame, just acknowledge I'm human. I made a mistake and now I need to repair as much as I can. How to atone, not only for myself and for the person I've harmed, but there's this whole, this learning that like, If we don't attend to those harms, they get passed on. They become things that our Children and our grandchildren and people we don't even know who are related to us might have to deal with. And so I love this teaching from Judge Abby. We were doing an event in San Francisco together and a woman, around my book and a woman in the audience said, you know, what can I do? What can we do? And we're as non natives and and she said, well, it's about relationships. I know this sounds vague, but honestly, it's just about knowing each other and knowing what each other needs and it's about how do we be good ancestors? And she said, because as that's what she said, we're here to be, to do in life is to be a good ancestor because, and that means not passing down harms that our descendants will have to attend to.
Chrissie: So much good stuff. I mean, multi generational trauma, et cetera, et cetera. Like we can go so deep. I love that you start with the Pobram with Harry in Odessa in the book. And, and I really was so profoundly moved by learning, that we, we set a model for Adolf Hitler to follow. This was profoundly hard to acknowledge and also deeply moving. And I'm acknowledging that in the context of, you know, when we think about Jews as a group, and we think about, uh, you know, they're wandering, they didn't wander, they fled, first of all, um, love that line. And also we think Holocaust, right? So when you are telling this story and bringing the line of your immigration, your, your lineage of immigration into, um, such relief next to the Holocaust that inspired the Holocaust, right? Genocide that inspired the genocide, like there were so many loops of resonant history that I just found chilling.
Rebecca: Yeah, it's amazing. I didn't know. I was a kid who was obsessed with the Holocaust. I really thought I knew so much about it. And it wasn't until I was spending much more time in Lakota communities that I learned that everyone it felt like around who I was spending time with in native communities in the Dakotas knew that Hitler and his legal team had studied American law to figure out how to make legal changes to diminish the rights of its Jewish citizens, because that is what America had done to its black and native citizens in this country. And there's a whole book about it for people who want to learn more called America's, uh, no, it's called Hitler's American model by James Whitman, who was a Yale legal scholar, but it took Doug Whitebull, this Lakota elder to tell me about this for then I did a deep dive on the research and just felt like, what? I can't believe I didn't know this.
And I have at this point done, I think 55 events since the book came out with all around the country. And regularly Native people know that and, and regularly non Native people have never heard that before. And to me, that more than anything really shows us how we have been given a form of history in many cases, which is a form of erasure.
Chrissie: Mm. Yes. And also, I, um, you know, when we think about folks who have been systematically marginalized, uh, systematically oppressed, the pain story becomes the story, right? And then we forget to tell the stories of black joy, stories of native joy. Right? There are, those stories are just as inherent and important.
Rebecca: Yeah. That's cool. You asked me that. I did an event with Seahdom Edmo, who's the director of Seating Justice, this amazing advocacy organization. And she is, um, her family's from Celilo Falls. Um, she's an indigenous woman. And she said, I want to talk about the joy in this book, the humor, which I was like, totally blown away by that read on the book. Um, I did feel like there's a lot of dark stuff in this book. I'm going to get some jokes in where I can. Um, but she really, she was the first person to really name that, that there, there were lots of places in the book that made her laugh. And I was so, so happy to hear that. There was one Lakota woman who, when I met her in Standing Rock, she said, so many of my friends are Jewish and I said, Well, that's interesting. Why do you think she's like, because we're, we're so similar, like, we're all so oppressed and we all use humor to rise above and serve, have resilience in the face of that.
Chrissie: And also very connected to, um, sacred rituals.
Rebecca: True. Yeah. True. I think, you know, I mean, that could be said of many, many lineages, but I think that's really true.
Chrissie: One of the, one of the lines that made me laugh out loud was the family trait of creating empathy through medical diagnosis. Oh my God. It's so deep. I do it all the time. Yeah. It's like, Oh, they probably, they probably have some neurodiversity. We should probably, they're, they're really a jerk, but maybe they've just never gotten the support they needed.
Rebecca: Yes, we all do that.
Chrissie: Um, I just felt so much gratitude for the medicine of becoming better informed. Um, it was, it was medicine to me. I didn't know that Sundance had been made illegal.
Rebecca: Yeah, totally. There were all these, I found actually a friend of mine who's a Lakota attorney. He works for the Native American Rights Fund. He shared with me these 18, there were several different versions starting in the 1880s of the United States policy that, and like all the different pieces of, of Native culture that were specifically called out as illegal. And what would, what would happen? So, like, and I went to the archives in North Dakota and found this, um, it was like an arrest book is this leather bound old handwritten book from the late eighteen hundreds and the things people were going to jail for were, like, getting divorced. Um, they were practicing their religion. Um, And I knew that my family here at the almost the exact same time is living 13 miles away from this Standing Rock Reservation, and they are having affairs, they're getting divorced, they're drinking alcohol, they are definitely practicing their religion a lot, and speaking Yiddish, and they're not facing any of the exact same problems. Consequence and no consequences for them at all during this time,
Chrissie: right? Um, and illegally smuggling hooch around in, uh, prohibition
Rebecca: later. Yes. That was later in the thirties. Yes. My family, this was what we call a big Shonda, um, in the book was that my family when they come to America, they are homesteaders and they're ranchers, but it's, it's not easy to make money on the land in an unirrigated, dry place, and they keep their land, but they also become saloon owners in the Black Hills, which is about 70 miles to the west of where their homestead was, and so when South Dakota becomes one of the 1st states to pass prohibition before it's a national law, they have to move away. They move to Minneapolis. They keep their land, but they move to Minnesota and they open saloons in Saint Paul, not Minneapolis, actually in Saint Paul and then when prohibition passed is passed nationally, they figure out how to continue to make money in their industry. And I think this is another thread and another layer of, of surprising joy that I found in this process, because this is a piece of my family history that I always knew, but I grew up in Seattle and I didn't grow up in Minnesota where the vast majority of my family members were still living. And my cousin Aviva, who did grow up there, who's my generation, she never knew this history because it was still something to be deeply ashamed of. That our family broke the law. We had a relative who ended up going to Leavenworth prison because he got caught. And, you know, my, my people in my generation now think this was really, uh, kind of cool. Like this was a bad law. My family figured out how to survive and stick it to the man. But for my aunt Edda's generation, my grandmother's generation, this was something to never ever talk about. And so when I, when I decide to write this family history and to me, I needed to tell this piece because it's a, it's this, another surprising thing I never knew was that part of the major reason that the people pushing for prohibition want this law passed is because the alcohol industry at the time is far overrepresented by people who are foreign born or the first generation born to foreign born. And so, and this was this idea of people like Henry Ford, they thought if we, if we get rid of Alcohol in America, then the people, the Jews, the Italians, the Irish, who are working in this injury, they will go back to where they came from. They will move. This was about xenophobia. This had really nothing to do with alcohol as as a vice. And, of course, that wasn't my family wasn't going to go back to Russia. That was so unsafe for them there. This is happening as Hitler is coming into power. And so they figured out how to stay, but the joyous surprise of this part of the book is that, um, it was so triggering and scary for my aunt that I, I wanted to write about this and literally, it's on the page in the book, as you know, her saying to me, don't write about this. Don't do it. It'll cause harm. And ultimately she just died two weeks ago and she was 91 and a half and she had a good life and I'm going to miss her so much. But what I'm so grateful for is she lived long enough for us to, to really like transcend that moment in the book because I ended up showing her an early copy of the book. We went back and forth in so many conversations about why I was including that there's another piece of the book she really didn't like which was about some domestic violence that happened in my family. Again I felt like this is truth telling. That was in, I think in some ways associated with the trauma. My great-great grandfather experienced in Russia when he was beaten to with the next of life in the pogrom. Right.
Chrissie: I mean, TBI, right. Traumatic brain injury.
Rebecca: yeah, and I'm trying to tell a really wide. and deep, totally deep story and I'm just so grateful to share with your listeners and readers of the book that ultimately Edda got an early copy of the book about a month before it was actually out on shelves and it was right before Yom Kippur and she wrote me an email and she said, I have to tell you, reading parts of this book made me so sad and I am so proud of you and I love you and thank you for helping me be more of a realist at the age of 90. And a week before she dies, she had broken her hip. She's in the hospital. Her daughter told me that one of the last conversations she had with her doctors was bragging to them about my book and how she was in this book and a part of making the book. And, um, I think she got to realize that this shame, this thing she carried around for so long as a shameful thing, didn't need to be shameful. And so many people in my family have said, like, it actually felt really humanizing to see our relatives as, as, As flawed, but real people,
Chrissie: real characters, I have chills thinking about her full circle moment with that. And my deep condolences about her passing. And also my deep congratulations to her having lived such a long and wonderful life and having contributed to her family's carrying forward to have been this incredibly essential link and first person witness, uh, to this history and to this telling. I love hearing, um, you know, when folks in their final years still have room for awakenings, realizations, insights, you know, we are becoming more and more porous,
Rebecca: it made me feel so hopeful for the rest of us. If a, if a 90 year old could demonstrate flexibility of mind and not only that she, she never gave up on me. I know there are so many families that there's this really hurtful. I mean, I have examples of this in other other parts of my family of people being mad at each other and then just never talking. And yet, Etta just kept leaning into her love for me. She never gave up on our relationship. And I think that's one of the most profound things. She taught me so much about our family history. She was really the matriarch. She really kept a lot of all these, I mean, literally thousands of pages of original documents. But I really think the most profound lesson she taught me was how to. To, to lean into love through hard and seemingly intractable conversations.
Chrissie: I was just recently introduced by one of our coaches, Peter Kahn, to, you know, the concept that to be related is to be in a cycle of relational repair. There is rupture, there's connection, disconnection, or rupture and repair. And if we ever decide not to have the repair part of the cycle, then that forwards us to the end of the relationship or a long break in relatedness, um, which has certainly been The case for different folks at different times and in my own family and different layers of it.
Rebecca: I love that. And I think it's relevant to add here that the Lakota word for white person is wasichu. Wasichu can mean a couple different things, but one of the main ways it gets translated is as someone who doesn't have relatives. Someone acts as if they don't have relatives because to have relatives means you're taking responsibility. You're owning your own stuff. You're caring for others.
Chrissie: Yes. Acknowledging all my relations. Exactly.
Rebecca: Yes. Exactly. Exactly.
Chrissie: Um, another time that I laughed in your book, Becca, was Little Shtetl on the Prairie. And it made me actually think about Little House on the Prairie, of course.
Rebecca: Big fan. Big fan over here.
Chrissie: Big fan. Big fan. I haven't visited that in many decades. But this is the same time frame.
Rebecca: Yes, it turned out that Laura Ingalls Wilder's younger sister, Carrie, who was an editor and newspaper woman, she had a homestead that was not very far away from my family's land and homestead and was like working as a newspaper editor in a nearby town, like the place where my uncle Louis went to get his mail. It's just was a mind blowing realization at the time. And, and, you know, I adored that show. I adored those books growing up, and then I reread them with my kids and realized, oh, dear, there are so much racist mythologizing so much fear, not really based in any reality of their native neighbors, the wild, the Ingalls Wilders, native neighbors. And, um, if anyone of your listeners are fans of those books and hasn't read Prairie Fires, the incredible, um, biography of, of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and that really talks a lot about the writing of those books, what went into it a lot about her daughter, um, you learn so much about the sort of fictional aspects of those stories. And, um. And the politics that went into the writing of them, too, I would really recommend that they were, they were wonderful.
Chrissie: I am interested, for sure.
Rebecca: I think it won the National Book Award, or a Pulitzer. They won a major prize not too long ago.
Chrissie: Yeah. Um, yes, even your, your relatives even had one of the, the dugout, um, I forget the name.
Rebecca: They had a sod house. It was like a house made of bricks, of soil. Can you even imagine how gross that would be? Like, oh my god.
Chrissie: You described it with such clarity that I feel like I've been in one, and then it reminded me, like, in my mind, it was basically the same mental space that I created when I was eight years old reading Little House on the Prairie, and I was inside their sod house, but I didn't realize, like, oh, I just went back to, like, A room in my brain that I created 40 something years ago.
Rebecca: I love that. I think I probably did the same thing. And I, I mean, my uncle Louie, when he was an adult, was interviewed by a national Jewish newspaper and he described, they, they quoted him about that they lived in this sod when they first got there and he, and they, they said he shuddered at the memory, like that's a salient detail right there. Yeah. I mean, well, and it's also so funny to think about. You want to talk about medical diagnoses that we think probably this great-great grandfather of mine, Harry probably had a traumatic brain injury from the pogram. He's living out in, on a, in a cave when he first gets to the prairie and his wife, I guess, cause like, I will not live in a cave. You must buy me a house. Build me a house before we get out there. And so then she shows up and it's, it's a house not made of like any kind of building material except for dirt. And that's what she's stuck living on. I just, I can't imagine. I just can't imagine. I recently was on book tour and I drove from Omaha, Nebraska through Sioux City, Sioux Falls, all the way up to Brookings and this little town called Del Rapids, where, um, my and an ancestor of mine had a dry goods store and many relatives of mine when they 1st moved to America, they were peddlers and either on foot with a big backpack on their back or with just a horse and wagon, they would, they were sort of a traveling store of dry goods to different farms. And that was their route. And it was an onerous 3 hour drive in a rental car on like, just because it was so windy and the weather was so unpredictable. There was a massive lightning storm. I mean, I don't, they, how did they live doing that job? It, it says so much about what it takes to be an immigrant to start over the grit and optimism you must have to make that work.
Chrissie: Yes. And then doing it inside a very wrong headed cast system, right?
Rebecca: Right. You're afraid because you're Jewish that you are going to at any time be exiled that that was like a really in play for them.
Chrissie: Yeah. I mean, I don't know that we said this exactly. You said it was a history of land policy in the West, but the, the gist is that your ancestors who were immigrating from Eastern Europe and vast depressions were given land grants of these large swaths of land in South Dakota that had just recently been taken from, you know, the Native people, um, in bloody ways and you detail some of the battles and some of the, um, what's the word for not a battle, but when you're just set upon,
Rebecca: I mean, I say at one point in the book, like, I sound like a broken record, but the record is broken. There was just sort of this ongoing legalized effort to take native land. So initially it's straight up trying to commit genocide. And then they realize the American government realizes it's really expensive to have soldiers on the planes and let's instead just completely annihilate their culture. I mean, it's what we now call cultural genocide. It didn't work, but they tried to do that and they tried to forcibly assimilate people and take their land. And, um, they did. I did some research in coordination with a geographer at Haskell University, and we looked into the treaties, which aren't written, like, it's a, a hundred acres of land or it's, you know, the, the treaties are not written, the treaties that delineate what the Lakota land would be reserved for in perpetuity for the Lakota. The acreage wasn't laid out in numbers. It was sort of like from these mountain range to this river, but we, we dug into it and with his help, I realized that what I read in the book is that by the time my family is planting their first crop in 1908, the Lakota are living on just 2 percent of the land that they had reserved would be theirs in perpetuity less than 60 years earlier. 2%. I mean, what an insane change of in all the levels in such a very short period of time for them to go through.
Chrissie: Yeah, it's not lost on me that we are recording this on election day in 2024, um, in the midst of a presidential election, just could not be more consequential. And also that this episode will air in November, which is Native American history month. Um, and I think that it's really timely because I do want to sprinkle some joy. I do want to find ways to solve for joy and, um, you know, send both material and metaphysical, uh, relief as we reveal the privilege that we are complicit in receiving as landholders and, um, even just like cultural privilege holders in this society.
So you have generously shared some resources in the book about that, as well as some really specific stories. And, you know, even in my just sharing about your book to people around the time that I was reading it, um, I had more than one person. Say, Oh, I never thought about my family's history like that, my family, not mine particularly, but this person said, my family were, they were farming in Indiana. Like, what is their version of that?
Rebecca: It's, it's so many of our histories. There's been research that's shown as many as 25 percent of American adults living today descend from homesteaders and almost the, I don't have this off the top of my head, but a lot of the land that was given as these free federal homesteads had most very recently belonged were, we're made available from the breaking of treaties with native nations and treaties are supposed to be the highest law of the land. Um, so it's a lot of us, it's as many as 90Million of us in America today who have this history. There was a sociologist out of Brandeis who said, you know, if you descend from homesteaders, and you can send your kids to college or buy a home without loans or even with loans. It's likely you can do that because of the intergenerational wealth accrued from homesteading. I, I had so many stories that had been given to me by my family about this time of our lives in South Dakota, but I wanted to drape those stories over something resembling a fact. And so I actually pulled every deed on the land my family owned. And then I pulled every mortgage on those deeds. And, um, I had some help, uh, during the pandemic, I couldn't go to the register of deeds office and a wonderful, historian helped me do that work. And she then gave me every single scan of every single mortgage. And then I created Excel spreadsheets.
And what, what I learned, especially cause I had all these letters and other documentation of what's happening in my family's lives is when you would look at the date on the mortgage for sort of a relatively small amount of land. You would see this pattern where they would take out a mortgage, and then they would use it to really improve their lives. They would, they would buy one.
Chrissie: It was like a HELOC.
Rebecca: It was amazing. Yes, it was like a HELOC. It was like, it was a landlocked. They would like, I mean, I think I call it the platform shoes of class. I mean, it was like, they could, they could start new businesses, they could buy more land, they could buy equipment, they could move, it was leverage, it's the basis of so much of our capitalist system, they were not the only people doing this on the prairie. Um, by the way, I, I think it's important to say that Jewish homesteaders were very rare, I think there were a thousand Jewish homesteaders in the Dakotas, And just the Dakotas. And that was like a half of 1 percent of all,
Chrissie: it's not really part of, um, you know, generalized American lore about homesteaders.
Rebecca: But like, just to say that everyone, when I was pulling these mortgages and deeds, you'd see the nearby other, you know, the way they were filed in these books and the register of deeds, you'd see other people doing the same thing on the same day. And everyone was doing this. This was to be expected. And yet, um, when you, it was real money. When I added up all that, the numbers of how much the mortgages were valued at, and I put them into today's dollars, it's 1. 1 million dollars. It's a lot of money, and the Lakota were then not accessing that at all. So, Yeah, I, I've, I've really been so powerfully and profoundly touched as people when I've traveled around have come up to me and say, my family were homesteaders and until this moment, you know, listening to you talk, it never occurred to me where our family land came from. My friend Brent Shelton, I had always been sort of had this pride of being from homesteaders and a friend of mine and I used to have like a pioneer swap, we called it, where we would like help each other out with gardening projects basically, but we called it like pioneering and we would help each other make canned goods and I never say that anymore because Brett said people have license plates in Colorado here where I live that are talking about being descended from pioneers. When I see that, I get really nervous. What that says to me is your ancestors hurt my ancestors, your ancestors probably attacked my ancestors. And it was just this total reframe, reshaping of my sense of American history in that moment of conversation.
Chrissie: The prairie schooner becomes like the Confederate flag when you think about it that way. It really does. And I loved the, um, you know, the line that it's easy to lie to people that don't have lying as part of their culture. That was just heartbreaking.
Rebecca: Yeah, that's a Judge Abby line. I love this line that Faith Spotted Eagle. She's a Dakota elder. There's a wonderful YouTube clip you can find of her talking on David Nyman's podcast that he does with Lely Longsolder. That's a lot of linking, but, um, she, or in the back of my book, I show where to find it. It's Anyway, she has this incredible line where she says, when non Native people and Native people study the history of our country together, for Native people, it's healing, and for non Native people, it is freedom from denial. And I can say for myself. I have experienced what is a little bit like joy and more like relief, the freedom from denial, but it really truly has helped me to have more compassion for myself to see my ancestors as to come out of denial about the way they move through the world, the way our country has moved through the world to stop saying, Oh, our founding fathers, they really were so perfect. And we're just a mess now, this whole idea of make America great again, like. What? What are we talking about? That's ridiculous. Like, if it wasn't just a dog whistle for, for like, Nazis. I mean, it's so much more. I mean, oh, man. I mean, the history of our country is the more I feel like now, the more I hear people say, talk politicians who are talking about freedom, who are talking about any of those kind of key terms. I feel like they mean the opposite. I feel like they're more invested in in not seeing truth.
Chrissie: Yeah. It's Orwellian. It's Orwellian at times. Double speak and redefinition and all those things. right?
Rebecca: But to really see it, the truth, and to listen across culture to each other, there is a real sense of the shift that I've experienced in a freedom.
Chrissie: Yeah, absolutely. Um, I think the freedom from denial is so important and it's an important and essential ingredient to telling Our stories and our histories with integrity, and I think integrity is really, um, a necessary building block towards true joy.
Rebecca: How come? Why do you think that? Why is it?
Chrissie: I think that when we experience a positive emotion outside of integrity, it doesn't have the wholesome, residents that I call joy, which is meaning alignment
Rebecca: What does integrity mean to you? Sorry, I'm interviewing you.
Chrissie: I think fidelity, like inner and outer consistency. What do you think?
Rebecca: I mean, I, that makes sense to me and I feel it and not to just bring us full circle here, but I feel like that's part of why the bar mitzvah was so joyous because it was more joyous even than a wedding. Because I think there was this deep efforting that my kid had to do to get to that place. So there was like, all of this hard work and optimism that went into showing up that day, believing that they could do it, the efforting to do it, all of our support all the words of our community saying, this isn't a performance, people screw up all the time when they read the Torah. It's not about being perfect. It's just about doing it and being here and. And that was, I think, such a piece of the joy, um, actually part of the joy too, was that my aunt had just, not that I was joyous that she had died, but that because she died, I had left so many details of the last minute, Chrissie as a classic journalist. And then I had less time because I had gone to her funeral and I was grieving and I had to lean on so many people and they showed up in so many ways. And so there was this, It was not on the surface, like, Oh, yay, you did a thing and we're going to celebrate you. It was this true, deep fidelity of celebration that they were, were in it with us. That we were really connected to each other.
Chrissie: Yes, I feel that. And I love that you brought it full circle because it's a great closing image for me to think about.
Rebecca: I have one more image to share with you, which is you guys have all probably seen movies of Jewish people. You like the crazy dancing in a circle when your people are being with the chair. Until my wedding I never understood that and how that's actually a massive metaphor because when you're in the chair, you're not in control and you are entirely held by your community and it was the 1st time since I've been a child that I felt that weightless support. And on Saturday night, we raised our kid in the chair and then we, as parents got to also be raised and I laughed like, like people talking about ugly crying. I was like, ugly laughing so deep and hard. And it was, it was amazing. It was truly amazing to feel that
that incredible support beneath.
Chrissie: It feels like catharsis and joy at a peak, peak moment.
Rebecca: It was amazing, especially cause we were like at a pizza place with no, like these flimsy chairs that we really both thought were about to break.
Chrissie: Oh my goodness. Well, Becca, thank you so much for joining me and having this conversation. It has definitely added to my joy, and I have no doubt that it will be prompting just such interesting deliberation in many of our listeners. And I cannot commend enough to you. Go and read. Or listen to The Cost of Free Land. I've really enjoyed your reading of it. Um, I must say on audible, it was really, it was really lovely. Yes.
Rebecca: Well, it's always a joy to be with you. And honestly, I feel like this was great medicine on election day. My nerves feel more calmed. And isn't that just what we were saying? Like being together is the antidote for anxiety really, you know,
Chrissie: it really is.
Rebecca: So thanks for having me, Chrissie
Chrissie: thanks for being here. And thanks everybody for tuning in. We will catch you next time on solving for joy podcast.
Hello, beautiful listeners. Thank you for tuning in today. If you've been paying attention to the emails, you're already aware that we're pivoting in January. I want to let you know that starting in January, I'm going to focus on serving 25 mid career physicians in an exciting new program called ROAR. Recover, optimize, activate, and reignite. If you feel like you might be one of those 25 mid career physicians that belongs in that room, welcome to a revolution in reclaiming your power, your voice, and your place in medicine. To a refuge for physicians, ready to reconnect with their purpose and healing in a world that has demanded too much of them. Welcome to a community that will nourish your spirit and mind and the company of others who are committed to the same. Welcome to a calling to a movement that's reshaping what it means to care, to lead well, and to heal. This is a space for physicians who are done suffering in silence and confusion. It's a sanctuary for those who know the system needs changing and that that change necessarily starts within us. This is a space to reclaim your strength, your creative wisdom, connect with your why, and to rise with others as a force of integrity and resilience, resourced and inspired. Your capacity to resist what needs resisting and reclaim your sovereignty rises and falls with your ability to manage your mind and harness the immense neuroplasticity and creativity within you. This is the way to that. If you feel like you might be one of those 25 physicians that needs to be in this room, please reach out through the website. All the details are available at joypointsolutions. com. And then join us next week, where I am going to talk more about the foundational virtues of this program, as well as my larger work in joy point solutions. Here's a teaser. We're going to talk about radical truth telling, self sovereignty, unwavering integrity, and honest imperfection. Courageous curiosity, compassionate boundaries, and authentic ownership. I cannot wait to talk about that with you. But in the meantime, especially right now, please take care of yourselves. Rest when you need rest, put your hand over your heart in a gesture of connection, take care of others and keep solving for joy. I'll see you next week, .
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