And I want to start there and just, I guess I want to ask first, what led you to begin the work that turned out to be the cost of free land?

Well, I had been writing a series of stories that were running in the nation and Indian country today about how sort of the legacy of federal policy, its impact on native communities today.

And I had spent a couple of years doing that research.

And that was a layer on top of two decades of reporting in the American West and writing about, you know, during that time, that times about Native communities.

And I just had this, I always say it wasn't like an aha moment, but it was this dawning, slow dawning realization that stemmed from super many, many conversations with indigenous elders, sources, That made me realize, oh, wait, I'm talking about this impact of federal policy.

I have failed to see this is my story, too, because my ancestors were immigrants who got free federal homestead on the South Dakota prairie.

And the feeling that came up for me around that, since you asked about feeling, is a profound feeling of.

So I'm interested in how that idea lives in you or how that question has lived in you in your work.

And as Rebecca reports, most European immigrants turned out to be, at the very least, white enough, like her Jewish ancestors.

So my great-great-grandparents, Harry and Fagatka Sinekin, they had six children.

And they lived in Russia at a time when Jews were not allowed to own land.

My great-great-grandfather was beaten to within an inch of his life in a pogrom in 1881 in as these pogroms are spreading throughout Russia and peasants and Russian soldiers are indiscriminately beating Jews and burning their homes and businesses, many Jews try to get out.

It was a hard way to earn a living.

He learns at some point that there is free land for the taking in South Dakota, 160 acres that would be his to keep if he can do what was called proving up, turn that wild prairie into farmland and tame it.

And this is the family lore, that he writes a letter to my great-great-grandmother, who's still in Russia, and he tells her, I can get free land.

Should I do it? And these are not people that have owned land before.