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Schadenfreude Is a Tasty Confection!
In 2016, when my wife and I visited every state, we spent most of our time in Vermont in Burlington. So, of course, we did visit Ben and Jerry’s, where we had a delightful tour of their facilities. The four-dollar tour included a sample at the end, so it was well worth the price. I was most amused by the graveyard on the grounds for dearly departed flavors such as Brownie Batter, Wavy Gravy, and Dave Matthews Band One Sweet Whirled. This is hallowed ground, of course, and it would be sacrilege if anything else was placed there.
But someone is suggesting that very thing!
The Coosuk Abenaki Nation, one of the four native American tribes recognized in Vermont, is looking to make the land where Ben and Jerry’s Headquarters their own. Don Stevens, a tribal chief, told the New York Post, “If you look at the (Abenaki) traditional way of being, we are place-based people. Before recognized tribes in the state, we were the ones who were in this place.”
Stevens has hopes that Ben and Jerry’s will co-operate in returning the land and his hope is based on a statement from the organization itself. On Independence Day, the company’s press release questioned whether we should be celebrating the Fourth of July. “The United States was founded on stolen indigenous land. This Fourth of July, let’s commit to returning it.” Ben & Jerry’s added that the US should “start with Mount Rushmore,” writing, “The faces on Mount Rushmore are the faces of men who actively worked to destroy Indigenous cultures and ways of life.”
Therefore, I would expect we will be hearing any day now that the company will be giving up their land and moving their headquarters to, let’s say, Palestine. Because they are men of their word. (Old, rich, white men of their word.) And I’m looking to Sugary Schadenfreude to being added to their list of flavors. Do you have any flavor suggestions?
I certainly hope that B&J doesn’t do something as crass as offer white man’s money as compensation for their continued usurpation of tribal lands. They really need to leave at once.
The sign says it is tobacco free, but I bet other stuff gets smoked there.
As Glenn Reynolds suggested, the tribe should just go down to the courthouse and file a lien. B&J has already admitted the proper ownership.
Those are two disgusting human beings. Make a billion dollars profit and demand everyone else become a Marxist. They were born and raised Jews but would deny a home to other Jews who escaped the holocaust. I have great difficulty with people like them.
For some tribes, tobacco has religious significance.
Now I have no idea where the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation stands on such things, but this could be religious persecution as well. Leastways, one would be better off avoiding Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream until the spirits have been appeased.
You wouldn’t want to have to go through what the Freeling family did, would you?
And Mindy reminds me that it isn’t Burlington VT, it’s Waterbury, VT. And now that this is on the main post, I can’t edit it. Someone needs to get me a map.
Burlington…Waterbury…who knew, and who cares? Just kidding, I’m sure that must be very important to somebody.
Ben & Jerry’s added that the US should “start with Mount Rushmore,” writing, “The faces on Mount Rushmore are the faces of men who actively worked to destroy Indigenous cultures and ways of life.”
Couple of things. I recall hearing about a long haired fella (similar to Ben and Jerry?) who advised that the place to “start” was with the beam in one’s own eye before calling out the moat in South Dakota’s. (Which means the Chief is right. Start by giving back your own d*** land, B&J.)
And it seems to me the men whose names appear on every Ben & Jerry’s carton worked pretty actively (and profited immensely) contributing to the epidemic of adult onset diabetes in the US, not just among indigenous people, but everyone else on whom they push their over-sugarized product.
Elizabeth Warren could sponsor legislation compensating those who return land to the descendants of the last folks who owned it (though it is likely they had committed genocide on earlier peoples) when the Europeans showed up.
Waterbury is about 20-25 miles ESE of Burlington.
That’s not true. It was true in some instances, and many of the methods other than theft that were used were far from honorable, but as a generalization that simply is misinformation. And it’s false misinformation at that.
How dare you suggest that men who make ice cream aren’t experts in history! (And politics and economics and…)
So basically a suburb.
Maybe, but Vermont is so small that’s quite a distance relative to the size of the state.
I think it was James A. Clifton (though it could have been another anthropologist/historian) who explained how here in my part of the Great Lakes Region, the Potawatomi and other Indians by the 1820s and 1830s were starting to learn how to use the American legal system to protect what was left of their land and their negotiated rights under treaties. They were learning the American systems of land ownership, and tried to get in on that. (American treaty commissioners usually refused to entertain the possibility, and would ridicule them for their attempts.) But by the time these Indians learned to use the courts, it was too late. Hardly anything was left of their lands.
Clifton was an interesting person. With his 1977 book, The Prairie People : Continuity and Change in Potawatomi Indian Culture, 1665-1965, he initiated a new way of researching and writing tribal ethnohistory that others have followed in writing about other tribal groups. Clifton got to know a lot of Potawatomi people in doing his research, and did a lot of testimony in court and elsewhere regarding native treaty claims issues and federal recognition issues.
From reading his books I would say he was a political liberal and had some of the typical blind spots of a political liberal in evaluating government programs of the 19th century, but one just has to make allowances for that. He was an honest academic, and that was his undoing.
Towards the end of his career he wrote a book titled The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies (1990) and instantly became one of the most hated and despised men in Indian Country (or at least in academic Indian country and among a lot of Indian activists). I don’t own a copy, but from memory it included a chapter on maple sugar production and whether European settlers learned it from Indians or vice versa. Clifton’s research led him to conclude the Indians learned it from European settlers. A chapter on Carlos Castenada exposed him as a fake. Clifton wrote about the destructive effects of affirmative action programs on Indian academics who he knew personally, who could never overcome the stigma of getting their jobs because of their ancestry rather than their abilities. And he talked about the pressure to testify in legal proceedings to things about Indian history that he knew were untrue.
At a Michigan local history conference that was attended mostly by amateur historians, but also a few professionals, I explained to an academic acquaintance about some topic I was working on, and for some reason that I don’t remember I referred to James Clifton’s work. My acquaintance (who is published in Great Lakes Indian history) warned me that I should know that Clifton was no longer considered “a friend of the Indian.” I assured him that I knew all about that, and we left it at that.
Clifton did most of his academic work at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, but after retirement got himself a gig at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo (which I didn’t find out about until he had been there a while). The WMU library has a great microfilm collection of Indian affairs documents from the National Archives (old handwritten documents). The microfilms were in such pristine position when I used them that I wondered if anyone besides myself ever made use of them. My guess is that the library purchased them at Clifton’s request, because I didn’t know of anybody else at that university who was working on topics involving those documents.
I had thought it would be great to get a chance to talk with Clifton, but I didn’t really have an excuse for doing so. But some time later, after spending a day at the archives at Fort Malden (run by Parks Canada, and located across the river from Detroit) I was rummaging through some of Clifton’s files (which he had deposited there, as that was where he had done some of his research) and came across an item, I no longer remember exactly what, that I thought gave me an excuse to get in touch with Clifton so we could talk about it.
A few days later I called the Anthropology department at WMU, and the secretary informed me that Clifton had recently died. I had missed my chance.
A few months later my wife and I were at a Monteverdi choral concert in Kalamazoo that was put on by one of Kalamazoo’s Bach societies. It was my first exposure to the work of Claudio Monteverdi, which in itself made it a memorable evening. I learned from a woman sitting near us that one of the soloists was her husband, and he had got a sore throat that morning. He was doing amazingly well just the same. And during intermission I talked to a man sitting next to me, who as it turned out was a member of the anthropology faculty at WMU. I told about my attempt to get in touch with James Clifton, and he filled me in on how Clifton was greatly disheartened and discouraged when he learned about the cancer that killed him. He barely had time to dispose of all his research papers before he was gone. Clifton is far from the first person I’ve known (or known about) who came to the end of life filled with regrets over work not yet completed. My own regret is that I never got to meet him.
Amazon says this is a collection of essays, not all written by James A. Clifton. I must confess that I didn’t remember that, though while writing the above paragraph wondered how Clifton could have found time to do all the research on Castenada, as that topic was not closely related to any of his other work. Clifton took the heat for the entire collection, though. I thought the chapter about the practice of universities hiring none other than people with Native American ancestry for positions involving research on Native Americans was written by Clifton himself, but now I’m not even sure of that. However, I just now ordered a used copy of the book from Amazon, so will be able to check for sure.
I am interested in what you discover.