Opinion: My family’s land was stolen from the Lakota. Can reparations make it right?

There’s a place in South Dakota, about 25 miles north of Wall Drug, that some locals still call “Jew Flats.” More than 100 years ago, the United States gave my great-great grandparents and their children, cousins and friends, around 30 Jewish families, free land in the West under the Homestead Act. All of the recently arrived immigrants spoke Yiddish; most escaped Russia with their lives but less so their livelihoods. These federal homesteads of 160-acre parcels were theirs to keep if they could turn wild prairie into farmland. My family told their children that owning land in South Dakota made them feel like real Americans. Coming from Russia where Jews weren’t allowed to own land, their ranch on Jew Flats allowed my ancestors to shake off their suspect immigrant status. The land also had serious economic impact. Between 1908 and 1970, when my grandmother and her sisters sold the last chunk of Jew Flats, my ancestors took out $1.1 million in mortgages, in today’s value, on their free land. With that money, they were able to start other businesses, buy more land and move away. Yet this land that paved my family’s pathway to the middle class came at great...