The chickens are coming home to roost. Members of an indigenous tribe who are descendants of Native Americans, have expressed their interest in reclaiming the land currently occupied by the popular ice cream company, Ben & Jerry’s. This follows the company’s controversial July 4th call for America to return what it deems as “stolen” land.
Don Stevens, Chief of the Nulhegan Band of The Coosuk Abenaki Nation, said in an interview with Newsweek that his tribe has always been interested in reclaiming stewardship of their ancestral lands. However, Ben & Jerry’s has not yet made any contact with them regarding the land on which its headquarters currently resides.
This comes in the wake of Ben & Jerry’s tweet on Independence Day, in which the company asserted that it was “high time” to recognize that the United States exists on stolen Indigenous land and commit to returning it. The tweet also included a link to the company’s website, where they further elaborated on their call to action, suggesting that America should begin by returning Mount Rushmore. These words sparked significant controversy and resulted in widespread backlash, including calls for boycotts and a decline in the company’s stock value.
According to historical records cited by Newsweek, the Abenaki Nation, a confederacy of tribes that united to resist rival tribes’ encroachment, once controlled a substantial area of land spanning from northern Massachusetts to New Brunswick, Canada. Consequently, the land where Ben & Jerry’s headquarters now stands in South Burlington, Vermont, was reportedly part of the Abenaki Nation’s territory. Critics have pointed to this fact and accused the ice cream company of hypocrisy for not returning the land it occupies while advocating for others to do so.
As of now, Ben & Jerry’s has not publicly responded to the calls for returning its headquarters’ land.
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13 Responses
You simply don’t understand. Just like everything else the left says they want it to apply to everyone else not to them.
Becuase the board doesnt have any say in returning the land, just on making comments
Democrat playbook. Do as I say not as I do.
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are hard-left radicals. Even after they sold out to British-Dutch mega-giant Unilever, the culture of sanctimony and didacticism they established persists. This is yet another derisible attempt on the part of the guilt-ridden uber-rich to assert their woke bona fides before a submental, morally bankrupt society. I do hope the Nulhegan Band of The Coosuk Abenaki Nation take Ben & Jerry’s for all they’re worth. And once that happens, I expect Cohen and Greenfield to thank them for the favor.
The Supreme Court of the US confirmed that Ben and Jerry’s tweet was true and correct.
In 1970, Indigenous activists climbed Mount Rushmore and occupied it for months, demanding that land be returned to the Sioux.
Ten years later, the US Supreme Court ruled that Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills had indeed been stolen, saying “A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never…be found in our history.” They awarded the Sioux $105 million in damages, but the tribes refused the payment. Why? Because this sacred land is theirs—and it’s not for sale.
I love it when real news starts looking like satire
They are hypocrites because they are leftists and leftists will never put their money where their mouth is.
That being said, in all probability, since Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company was sold to Unilever, it’s not up to these two rotten disgusting low-life pieces of excrement to give the land back to the Indians. It would be up to Unilever, which obviously ain’t happening.
But all humans claim to own the land that they inhabit even though: 1) all “science” claims that everyone migrated there from someplace else, and it appears that such mobility is a universal character trait of our species; 2) According to Humash, Ha-Shem is the sovereign who owns all lands, and everything else, and we Bnei Adam are using it by Ha-Shem’s sufferance.
Where did this made-up idea of returning land come from?
I don’t know that there’s a single country on earth where the current residents didn’t take the land from someone else. The Gemara says that the conquerors of old would deliberately displace populations and shift people around to eliminate their ties to their old land.
Native American tribes engaged in truly barbaric and savage acts on one another – stealing, massacring, seizing territory. What makes their so-called claims to the land any more valid than those who took it from them?
I’d like to see someone find an instance in history of any of them returning conquered territory to the loser.
What’s really sad is that this story will have zero effect on Ben & Jerry’s, and will not stop them from making more vapid, intellectually deficient comments in the future.
“Where did this made-up idea of returning land come from?” — A bunch of Jews came up with the idea of reclaiming Eretz Yisrael from the Yishmaelim, thereby by starting a war that has been going on for 100 years with many unintended consequences. Except for Israel, no movement that involved the indigenous people replacing the settled majority has gained traction, probably since it settlers once established have no desires to “go back to where they came from.” Where the indigenous group remained the majority, e.g. Ireland, South Africa, England (at the end of the middle ages), all it takes is democracy to peacefully evolve a change in political control. So the answer to brachavehatzlocha is that we are probably the source for the idea that is possible for displaced minorities to reclaim their homeland.
akuperma: The war between the ummat al-Islām and everyone else has been raging for over 1,400 years. At no time since the conquest of Joshua has the Jewish homeland been desolate of Jews. And while you oversimplify and trivialize the emergence of the State of Israel, irredentism did not begin with the Zionists. Further, your dubbing the Arab Muslims dwelling in our Jewish homeland “the settled majority” is both misguided and naïve.
Ari: Goyim have been the overwhelming majority of Eretz Yisrael since the end of the Roman period (by which time the Romans in the area were totally Greek). Then it was conquered by the Muslims. While the government has changed, and even if you limit Eretz Yisrael to the territory within the “Green line”, Jews have been a minority for well over a millenium (and occasionally in the 18th century, a plurality in Jerusalem, but still a small minority). By way of contrast, non-Indians have only been a majority in the United States, as now defined, since the early 19th century. If you don’t accept Torah (as is the case of most non-Arabs in Eretz Yisrael), how is the zionist case any different than that of American Indians.
akuperma: Thank you for keeping our exchange civil. Your assertion that most Jews in Israel do not accept the Torah is a sweeping charge that calls for qualification. There are Orthoprax observers of Jewish Law as well as nonobservant Orthodox Jews. One exemplar of the latter mode de vivre was Professor Harry Wolfson of Harvard. I have personally known a few like gentlemen in my time. So, we must bear in mind that nonobservance or lax observance does not necessarily evidence unbelief.
Secondly, during the Second Temple period, yes, the Patrician class among the Romans were educated in Koine, acculturating to the culture of Greece in early boyhood via Homer, Aristotle, and the Gymnasium. We know that the Roman officials in Iūdaea spoke not Latin, which the Jews generally despised as the Talmud Yerushalmi implies, but Greek, which the Jews esteemed highly.
Yet it is a real stretch to say that the Romans in the area were totally Greek. The Plebeians spoke only Vulgar Latin, to be sure, but Latin notwithstanding. Think of the situation thusly: When the governor or prefect spoke with the Sages or Jewish nobles, it was in Greek. When your dusty Milites spat at the Jews or massacred the Jewish inhabitants of this or that village, they cursed at them in Latin. Mel Gibson’s fantasy of all Romans in the area speaking Latin exclusively is a shameful distortion borne of age-old catholicization of history.
As an aside, we should not forget that the educated Jewish intercessors of Iūdaea (the communal representatives) were likely the most accomplished scholars anywhere, being quadrilingual (speaking Judeo-Aramaic from birth, Neo-Hebrew in the yeshiva and in the company of Torah scholars, Greek with the Roman officials, and Latin as well if they wished to forge positive political relationships with the mid-level Equites and attempt to prevent anti-Jewish actions on the part of the army).
As for the population of the First Nations: In 1790, the total population of the United States was 3,929,214. In the same year, the slave population was 700,000 or 18% of the total population. I cannot locate the Native American population from that year, but I find that they had a population of 1,894,350 at about the year 1500.
Obviously, this is not the way to do statistics. However, given conquest, starvation, miscegenation, and mass migration westward, it is probable that the white population of the United States in 1790 preponderated over the First Nations. We must remember that the US did not yet even include Florida. (The Adams–Onís Treaty whereby the Spanish ceded control over Florida was not signed until 1821.)
And yet a big problem looms: If we count the Northwest Territory of Ohio as well as the Southwest Territory, which are huge swaths of land containing what was then but a gradually whitening population, then yes, it is possible that there were more Indians than whites in the United States in 1790.