Instead of fireworks: Ben & Jerry’s and the stolen indigenious land
I’m spending the American national holiday in Billings this year. Although not particularly exciting, Montana’s largest city is also experiencing an enormous influx. At first glance: dignified college town. Center of commerce. Most impressive: the wacky loft of my eccentric host.
But there’s something else: the call of the ice cream manufacturer Ben & Jerry’s:
“The US Was Founded on Stolen Indigenous Land — This July 4, Let’s Commit to Returning It!”
Ben & Jerry’s 2023
The call says to start with the Mount Rushmore Monument. Because long before South Dakota had become a state, long before the faces of four American presidents were blasted into the stone of Mount Rushmore, that mountain was known as Tunkasila Sakpe, the Six Grandfathers, to the Lakota Sioux – a holy mountain that rises up from the Black Hills, land they consider sacred.
The Black Hills are known to the Lakota as “the heart of everything that is.” After decades fighting, the Lakota signed the Fort Laramie treaties of 1851 and 1868, establishing a 35-million-acre “permanent home” for them. The government broke those treaties only a few years later, when gold prospectors and settlers flooded into the Black Hills.
In 1980, the US Supreme Court ruled that Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills had indeed been stolen. They awarded the Sioux 105 million dollars in damages, but the tribes refused the payment. Why? Because this sacred land is theirs – and it’s not for sale.
That money has been held in trust since 1980 and now is worth about two billion dollars (with interest). The tribes still refuse it, despite living in some of the poorest communities in the US.
The ice cream manufacturer had hardly reckoned with this: the descendants of an indigenous people came forward that originally controlled the land in Vermont the Ben & Jerry’s headquarters is located on. A tribal chief told Newsweek they were “always interested in reclaiming the stewardship of our lands.”