"At any one of our 205 locations, we invite our Native American friends to bring in one scoop the color of a paleface colonizer to trade for a sweet treat!" said Jerry. "This promotion will continue until all Native American lands have been returned--except, of course, for the lands on which our 205 locations reside. Obviously. That's a no-brainer. Otherwise, we'd be out of business. Ha ha."
"This is our humble way of facilitating some reparations for past injustices," said Ben. "Because we're good liberals and that's what good liberals do."
"I want to reemphasize how good we are. We're really good people. So good."
At publishing time, Ben & Jerry had finally agreed to give back the ancestral lands of their store locations in exchange for having a new location in every casino.
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From the media -
Counter to the saccharine romance of such depictions as the famous Kevin Costner movie “Dances with Wolves,” Native American society was red in tooth and claw; Native Americans weren’t simplistic archetypes, but real people prone to all the usual flaws of human nature including hatred, greed and violence.
The Ben & Jerry’s July 4th message refers to the Lakota “fighting to keep colonizers off their land,” without any mention of the fact that just a short time before, they were the colonizers.
As Elliott West notes in his new book “Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion,” the advent of a horse culture among various Native American tribes made the Great Plains and Southwest a killing field of warfare and disease.
“Two great coalitions — Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Lakotas north of the Arkansas River and Comanches and Kiowas south of it — clashed bitterly until making peace in 1840, then both preyed on sedentary peoples on the fringes,” West writes.
Devastating smallpox epidemics, slaughters and raids and counter-raids were dismayingly routine features of these regions long before the United States was a contender for dominance.
According to West, one reason so much Mexican land was there for the taking during the Mexican-American War was it had been depopulated by constant Native American raiding.
Is it too much for Ben & Jerry’s to spare a thought for the Mexicans killed, captured or dispossessed by merciless Native American warriors?
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After being updated about Native American violence against the Mexicans, Ben And Jerry's are offering a free pint of the flavors of coffee, fudge and caramel to anyone who can prove that they or their close family members are illegal Mexican immigrants who sneaked over the border.
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First - for boycotting Israel for their human rights discriminations against the indigenous Palestinians who have been living in Palestine for thousands of years, as opposed to the Jews, who only started moving to Palestine for the first time in history after the 1948 war. Then - for standing up for the Native Americans. And then - for the Mexicans and illegal immigrants.
WE SALUTE YOU BEN AND JERRY!!! As proud Jews and TRUE social justice warriors - you are an example for all.
