It seems Ben and Jerry’s may be next in the firing line after they made waves with a provocative 4th of July tweet claiming the US is on stolen Indigenous land. Could we witness a downturn similar to Bud Light?
Or is their irresistibly good ice cream strong enough to keep their ship afloat?
Edit: Side note - in the absence of B&J, what ice cream are you turning to? I’m in AUS. So B&J was a game changer. Not anything else like it that I’m aware of.
I mean, it’s technically the truth. Unless you consider that the land was bought with a bunch of blankets. Anyway so what’s your favorite B&J flavor?
And it’s not like it’s a surprise that Ben & Jerry’s are ‘woke’. They were part of Bernie Sanders’ campaign.
I’m all for raw cookie dough 😍
Many “indigenous” people stole land from other " indigenous" people before Britain, France, and Spain stole the country from the indigenous people. The US took the land from Britain by war. It got the land from Spain and France through war/purchase.
That’s a very compressed 400 year history, so some facts are more nuanced, but that’s my point about saying the land was stolen. Every country was “stolen” from someone else sometime in history either through war or purchase.
How many of those forcibly displaced and nearly wiped out the previous “owners”?
Not to start a debate, but how many civilizations did the same before? I don’t see many Babylonians around.
Not to say that doing it makes it ok, but just because we have written history of some civilizations and not others should be taken into account.
Hasn’t every land been stolen from someone else ten times over since the beginning of recorded history?
I imagine you didn’t intend this because it’s reprehensible but you are defending genocide right now. Take a minute and rethink your life.
How am I defending it. It’s terrible when anyone does it.
Often people use rhetoric like yours to imply the genocide Americans did was just a normal thing that everyone did. Which is a form of genocide apologism. If that isn’t what you intended you might consider rephrasing. Sorry for misunderstanding.
I think what you say is fair if not true - one difference (and I’m sure there are more) is these weren’t lands acquired by conquest/military subjugation, but rather by agreement with the landholding populations to live in peace. What actually happened was the indigenous populations were lied to in one way or another such that the European nations never held up their side of the bargains because of ambiguity in the agreements in addition to Europeans plainly lying about what was being agreed to.
I think this is evident in the ways the Canadian Reconciliation Calls to Action use language such as “call upon the Government of Canada…to jointly develop with Aboriginal peoples a Royal Proclamation of Reconciliation…[which] would build on the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Treaty of Niagara of 1764, and reaffirm the nation-to-nation relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Crown”
Essentially these lands were never legally taken which is why the indigenous groups can/should lay claim to them. That makes this scenario different than a group being displaced by military conquest (which is technically recognized as a legal, albeit cruel, mechanism for displacing people).