Ben & Jerry: PURVEYORS OF GOOD ICE CREAM AND BAD POLITICS

If “indigenous” means naturally occurring, then there are no indigenous people in North America, and there never were.

In Greek mythology, Jason the Argonaut sowed dragon’s teeth in a plowed field, and fully grown warriors, the Spartoi, sprang up out of the earth! But there never were any real live Spartoi who were the indigenous human inhabitants of the western hemisphere.

All members of the species homo sapiens who now live in North America are descendants of immigrants to the western hemisphere. That includes "native Americans," all of whose ancestors, without exception, were immigrants or the descendants of immigrants to the Americas.

No one’s ancestors – red, white, yellow, or black – sprang up from the soil of the western hemisphere, like the Spartoi. So, to refer to any individuals or groups of people living in North, Central, or South America in the 21st century as “indigenous” is misleading.

It is true, however, that the earliest western hemisphere ancestors of tribal peoples now living in the Americas lived here thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years ago. They were EARLY IMMIGRANTS. They did not spring from the soil. Their ancestors came on boats or walked across a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska that ceased to exist ten or eleven thousand years ago.