This Land. Your Land. My Land.
| Publication year | 2020 |
| Author | By Dawn Schock |
By Dawn Schock
Dawn Schock has been a certified appellate specialist in California since 1999. She also serves as senior technical advisor to international rule of law development projects in the Balkans, Middle East, and North Africa, and the republics of the former Soviet Union.
Like me, some 46 million Americans —roughly 20% of the adult population — trace their roots to settlers under the Homestead Act. Like my family, the vast majority of homesteaders were White. (Keri Leigh Merritt, Masterless Men: Poor Whites, Slavery and Capitalism in the Deep South (2017) p. 38.) As an heir to homestead land, I cannot ignore the role race has played in my family's generational upward mobility. My immigrant forbearers established their citizenship while they perfected their claims by living on and cultivating their 160-acre parcels. As they did so, Native Americans, who had inhabited the lands for millennia, continued to be dispossessed. And emancipated African Americans, who had labored over two-and-a-half centuries to bring land in the American South into productivity, remained destitute.
Our Whiteness is not a feature reckoned in my family's stories about my German-Russian forbearers who left what is now Ukraine to homestead the Dakota Territory in the late 1880s. We celebrate instead the settlers' courage, tenacity, and work ethic; all true and worthy of celebration. But failing to account for race in our family myths renders them as incomplete as those of the country that deeded us our land.
The Black Lives Matter movement, the recent Supreme Court decision in McGirt v. United States, and the times in general call for a re-examination of our shared history. The path toward greater equality is not yet clear and will require a broad societal discussion. But movement activists are clear on first steps for White allies, among whose ranks I hope to be counted: Look again at your own privilege.
Called "the most comprehensive form of wealth redistribution that has ever taken place in America," 246 million acres of the American West — nearly the size of California and Texas combined — were granted to 1.6 million homestead households between 1868 and 1934. (Merritt, supra, p. 38.) Only about 3500 of those were Black households. (Nat. Park Service, African American Homesteaders in the Great Plains [as of Aug. 8, 2020].)
Versions of the Homestead Act were introduced in Congress annually beginning in 1845, but Southern...
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