Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company is no stranger to making political statements that veer toward the left. Their recent July 4th message, however, has caused an uproar. In their message they asserted that the country “was founded on stolen Indigenous land” and wrote that we should “commit to returning it.” The company called for the start of this redemptive process of returning the land to be the return of “Mount Rushmore to the Lakota [ a Native American tribe].”
“But what is the meaning of Independence Day for those whose land this country stole, those who were murdered and forced with brutal violence onto reservations, those who were pushed from their holy places and denied their freedom? The faces on Mount Rushmore are the faces of men who actively worked to destroy Indigenous cultures and ways of life, to deny Indigenous people their basic rights” asked Ben & Jerry’s.
The general pattern that the company points out with respect to the United States making treaties with Native American tribes and breaking them is a factual one. However, many took umbrage with the somewhat hypocritical stance of the company given that their statement does not include any action by the company, which operates and was founded on the same stolen land.
As the conservative comedian Tim Young put it the company and its owners should “Give ALL of your property and land back to the Native Americans right now then… or shut up.”
Kevin Dalton, a Twitter user, also shared similar sentiments when he wrote “I look forward to the virtue signaling Ben & Jerry’s returning their factory’s land to the Abenaki and Mohican Native Americans that have lived in Vermont for 10,000 years.”
The Twitter user Political Sock put forth a problem for the ice cream company to solve. Sock wrote “Please help me learn more & take action. In my part of Texas, the Apache took the land from the Tonkawa. Then the Comanche took the land from the Apache. The Mexicans took it from the Spaniards. The Texians took it from the Mexicans. Then Anglos took it. So, who gets the land?”
The self-described “not woke” Twitter user Joseph Massey wrote “First you [Ben & Jerry’s] need to apologize to the millions of cows you milked without consent. Your product is colonialist misogyny in the form of an overpriced desert. Stop feeding the people cow trauma.”
Leslie wrote “I’m Oglala Lakota Sioux (related to Chief Sitting Bull) and Navajo, and you embarrass me. We don’t need you to be offended on our behalf. Why don’t you go to Pine Ridge, S.D. and help for real, that rez is a hellhole and needs all the help it can get, if you want to help Natives.”
Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) also joined the fray against the company when he said that they lost “a once-loyal customer” and asked “When you suggest “returning” the land on which our country has been built for centuries, what exactly do you imagine? Expungement of property rights? Repatriation of most Americans to Europe?”
