Not Sioux land: Understanding the fallacies behind Ben & Jerry’s ‘stolen ground’ tweet
by Jeff Fynn-Paul, Opinion Contributor
On July 4, Ben & Jerry’s public relations division made headlines by tweeting, “It’s high time we recognize that the US exists on stolen Indigenous land and commit to returning it.”
The tweet was widely criticized. But behind the grandstanding and virtue-signaling, there is a deadly serious movement within American and Canadian liberal circles that holds both of these countries to be illegitimate. This movement holds that both the U.S. and Canada should, in some meaningful way, be given back to the surviving descendants of Indigenous people.
By their telling, Indigenous people have been subjected to a unique onslaught of persecution and suffering from the time of Columbus to the present. Included at the tail end of Ben & Jerry’s tweet is a link to an article that lays out in all seriousness why Mount Rushmore ought to be given back to the Lakota Sioux Indians, as a preliminary step to the return of the rest of the U.S. to its Indigenous owners.
“This year, let’s commit to returning the United States to its original Indigenous inhabitants,” the article begins. Full stop, no qualifiers.
This proposition would seem ridiculous and impractical. At the same time, it has a visceral logic that strikes many readers as watertight on first reflection. This is why the cause is so popular on social media platforms such as Twitter and why people need to understand and arm themselves with counterarguments.
According to the Ben & Jerry’s statement, the Sioux call the Black Hills “The Heart of Everything that Is,” and they have long been “stewards of the land.” This implies that the Sioux have been wise, peaceful, ecological stewards of the Black Hills since time immemorial. As they put it:
“Long before South Dakota had become a state, long before the faces of four American presidents were blasted into the side 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.”
This is a romantic tale, and a finely crafted piece of rhetoric designed to tug at the heartstrings. But the cold light of history reveals it to be a modern fabrication.
In fact, the Sioux migrated to the Black Hills region only about 100 years before making treaties with the U.S. government. The Sioux first appeared in records during the mid-1600s, living about 1,000 miles to the east of South Dakota, in the region of Lake Superior. It wasn’t until the mid-1700s, when the Sioux obtained horses from white traders, that they took to the plains.
Importantly, it was tribes such as the Ojibwe — not Europeans — who pushed the Sioux from their earliest recorded homeland. Suffering from relentless attacks by the Ojibwe and other Indigenous tribes, the Sioux were pushed farther and farther west. As the Sioux moved west, they alternately traded with, murdered, enslaved and stole land from the tribes who already occupied South Dakota, such as the Kiowa. This kind of land-grabbing was a part of life in pre-European tribal society.
This raises the question of why any part of South Dakota should be given to the Sioux, who themselves only occupied it by conquest, and only a few generations before Europeans arrived. If anything, shouldn’t this land be given to tribes from whom the Sioux “stole” it, such as the Kiowa?
And if the Sioux have any claim, shouldn’t it be to the land near Lake Superior that was “stolen” by the Ojibwe, rather than the Black Hills?
The arguments for restoring land in such a fashion at all appears to collapse under the weight of its own racialist rationale. It is incoherent to believe that only Native American tribes have a right to violently push other people off the land in North America.
By the same token, would it have been acceptable for the Aztecs to push northward and settle Louisiana, even if they enslaved and sacrificed many people from the Indigenous tribes they encountered along the way, as was their practice?
Ben & Jerry’s also suggested that the Sioux had to watch helplessly as ‘’their holy mountain, now located on land known as South Dakota, was desecrated and dynamited to honor their colonizers, four white men — two of whom enslaved people and all of whom were hostile to Indigenous people and values.’’
Aside from the fact that this “sacred mountain” was merely a hill that the Sioux had been living near for a couple of generations (their belief system held that every mountain was sacred), there is also no basis even for the claim that slavery was “hostile” to “Indigenous values.” Slaveholding was an integral and well-documented part of Native American culture before European settlers arrived.
As to the legal claim of the Lakota Sioux to Mount Rushmore, it was settled four decades ago, when the Supreme Court awarded the tribe $105 million for its claim to the Black Hills. That should be the end of it.
Even as the tribal leadership claim poverty, the Lakota Sioux have so far refused to accept this money. It has been accruing interest in a bank account and is by now worth more than $2 billion, or more than $20,000 for every man, woman and child enrolled in the tribe today.
