The Kroc’s Crock: Claiming Historical Homelands Long Gone
or
This Land Was Made for You and Me
By David Wemhoff
This land is your land, and this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me….
–Woody Guthrie, ca. 1940
American Independence Day used to bring stories in the main stream media about American heroism both during the Revolutionary War and after as this great country was carved out of a wilderness. Nowadays the stories are of how Americans, or White people in the United States, are the baddies one way or another and that the land should be returned to the “indigenous peoples” as the Native Americans are now called after they were named Indians.
This year, one prominent heckle came from an ice cream company that makes millions peddling to the very people it says need to dispossess themselves of land, returning the same to the “indigenous peoples”. National Public Radio (NPR), which could be termed the Anti-National Propaganda Service, did its own number on Americans by relating a story about a made-up Indian tribe crying over spilt water. But all of this was happening long after the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace posted its garbage about Potawatomi land.
All of this is a way of erasing a people – the Americans. It is delegitimizing their, our, right to existence, and it is coming from the highest levels of society. It is done in contravention of long held human traditions, customs, and the Natural Law. Notre Dame should know better, but it has always served the plutocratic elites and the plutocrats want to destroy the nations of the earth, and remake them to their whim. As this two part article shows, one of the ways to do that is to cut people off from their land, the cradle of their existence and identity. The same tactic used on the Potawatomi is used now, with some modification, on the Americans.
Ice Cream and Fake Tribes
A week after Independence Day this year, which marked 247 years of United States’ independence from the British Empire, National Public Radio (NPR) ran a story entitled “A racist past and hotter future are testing Western water like never before.”[1] NPR said that an unrecognized Indian tribe was claiming rights to the water serving San Francisco during a period of great drought. The essence to their claim was classic psychological warfare meant to demoralize and destroy the Americans. A Gary Mulcahy, “government liaison for the Winnemem Wintu tribe,”[2] said “What we say about the senior water rights holders is they all got their water through murder, mayhem, rape, theft and genocide.” Aside from the demoralization of Americans, Mulcahy’s comments are grist for the process which appears to be a shakedown of the Americans, particularly San Francisco. That is because NPR mentions how the Navajo in Arizona have rights to water pursuant to a treaty, but they do not have all the rights to the water which is something the Winnemem Wintu are claiming. Additionally, while the US Government gave water rights pursuant to treaty, there is no requirement for the Government to provide the means by which to access the water as NPR reported.
Ben & Jerry’s (BJ), the ice cream company, treated everyone to a social media post on July 4 in which it stated that “America `exists on stolen indigenous land’ and suggested land be returned to its ancestral owners.”[3] Judging by the way that sentence was written, the suggestion was that just some land be returned, not all land. We can imagine which land would not be returned but for the rest us, too bad because we cannot count on Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield to lead by example. And, we cannot expect them to be consistent, either. When BJ’s parent company decided to sell the franchise for the Palestinian Authority to Avi Zinger of American Quality Products in the summer of 2022, it was supposed to be a protest against the Israeli presence of illegal settlements in the Palestinian Authority.[4] BJ denounced this effort as a way to circumvent socially conscious policies to prevent the sale of the ice cream in the area where Israeli settlements exist in contravention of international law. Curiously enough, BJ is not calling for a cessation of sales in the US despite their July 4 tweet – that would be too costly for them as this is too big a market.
Americans are having taken from us the sense of being a nation, the better to build a new people beholden to the powers of the day and devoid of truth. Ice cream companies and wannabee or real Indians may be the instruments for this strategy, but so is the Catholic leadership. One way the Catholic leadership does it is by an emphasis on personal morality detached from social or group morality. Another way is to scapegoat one group or another to the exclusion of American identity, thereby building a “negative identity” which is never enough to develop a people properly. A third is to do what the Kroc did – separate the people from the land for land is essential to identity, and the cultivation of land is essential to civilization and right-ordering society. What the Catholic priests of the 1830s saw as happening to the Potawatomi is being visited upon the Americans today.
The Kroc’s Crock of Crap
The University of Notre Dame has something called the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies (the Kroc) which is part of the Keough School of Global Affairs. According to their website, the “Keough School of Global Affairs, is one of the world’s leading centers for the study of the causes of violent conflict and strategies for sustainable peace. Kroc Institute faculty and fellows conduct interdisciplinary research on a wide range of topics related to peace and justice.”[5]
The Kroc has a “global network of 1,900+” alumni who are “working at all levels of society to build a more just and peaceful world.” This is “integral to Notre Dame, an international Catholic research university.” And the Catholic Church “has a rich tradition of teaching on war, peace, justice, and human rights” while fostering “collaboration among religious and secular traditions, strengthening the capacity of all for building peace.”[6]
The Kroc then goes on to make a statement that is at odds with the spirit if not the letter of Catholic tradition:
“We acknowledge the Kroc Institute’s presence on the traditional homelands of Native peoples, particularly the Pokagon Potawatomi, who have been using this land for thousands of years and continue to do so. We recognize our own place in the history and practices of colonialism and understand that our responsibilities extend beyond this gesture of land acknowledgment. We must also reflect on the University of Notre Dame’s past, present, and future relationship with the original stewards of this land and actively pursue ways to amend this troubled relationship.”[7]
In a form of electronic chest-thumping, the Kroc goes on to say
“We also note that a land acknowledgement alone could be meaningless if it is not accompanied by active work to address the structural injustice and violence perpetrated against Indigenous people around the globe, both historically and currently. The Kroc Institute is committed to working to address these harms and to find ways to contribute to constructive transformation through our teaching, research, and peace building efforts.”[8]
Peace comes about by establishing right order, and right order is found in Catholic doctrine.[9] The Kroc’s statement is not about establishing right order. This is all a remarkable, but not unsurprising, approach of Notre Dame to things – ignoring or twisting Catholic doctrine all to serve the powers of the day. This is in Notre Dame’s “DNA” as they say and by saying that there is an explicit recognition of the importance and reality of DNA which is the building block of race. Race is another problematic area with Catholics since that has been weaponized against them and the American people by the societal elites who are intent on destruction of nations and sterilization of the land. Part of that destruction and sterilization is to erase entire peoples, and an essential tool in accomplishing that is to take away their land or any sense of identity with the land, or place. Ironically, years earlier in one of its many marketing campaigns, Notre Dame published a picture book, or coffee table book, called A Sense of Place. Now claiming that this land is Potawatomi homeland, Notre Dame is delegitimizing itself in the eyes of Americans. Again, Notre Dame’s real constituents have been the plutocracy so it really does not matter to them, for now, even if the Kroc announcement is the death knell of the thing known as Notre Dame.
Kroc’s reference to “traditional homelands of Native peoples, particularly the Pokagon Potawatomi” is the same as recognizing historical rights of people to property, whether that be the Pokagon or the Zionists. Catholic teaching has debunked these claims. In the Code of International Ethics, published with the approval of Archbishop Francis P. Keough in 1953, the following is clearly stated:
“73. It sometimes happens that injustice aided by force will prevail over right. Success in itself cannot legitimate such a victory; but prescription may at last validate the fait accompli. However well-founded their grievances may be, the needs of the common good will not allow States which have been the victims of an injustice to question perpetually the concessions they have been forced to yield. The order and peace of the world cannot suffer continuous upheavals of the international situation. This necessary sacrifice will not prevent those States from seeking by peaceful means the redress of the wrongs they have suffered.
“It follows that `historic rights’ are quite groundless and cannot justify the aims of bellicose nationalism.”[10]
This discussion is in the context of conflicts between States or nations in which the land of one is taken unjustly by another, and so there appears to be some applicability to the situation of the Potawatomi and the Americans. The difference is that the land upon which Notre Dame and much of Indian rests was not taken unjustly. But even assuming that it was, claims to historical territorial rights either by the dispossessed or misguided pseudo-champions must fail.
The importance of land is a matter of great importance because a nation or people is tied to the land. The Code explains in section 228:
“In one sense of the word, nationalism is closely connected with patriotism, without, however, having exactly the same meaning. Patriotism is a moral virtue which leads us to love our country, and to render all the duties prescribed by filial piety towards all those who have some claim to be responsible for our existence. The first thing which patriotism leads us to venerate is our ancestral land (terra patria, vaderland, vaterland, country), which we love, not for its own sake (we love our country, whether it is great or small, rich or poor, according as nature has made it) but because it is the cradle of our race, because it gave us birth, because it is the home in which we share the thoughts and feelings of men of the same blood and culture. Nationalism is concerned primarily with this community of race and blood (nasci: to be born); it is not necessarily confined to the territories of the State….”[11]
A people’s exclusive right to, or possession of, land is not absolute. Scholars debated this over the centuries and history has instance after instance of one people being subjugated by another people, or displaced by another people. The consensus of theologians is that while these things happen, sometimes they are quite acceptable even moral. A number of grounds have been laid out as acceptable or moral for one people to take the land of another, or to subjugate one people to another, despite the perpetration of atrocities and the presence of self-interest, there are general principles by which backwards peoples may be ruled over and their land taken from their exclusive ownership, possession or use.
One of these principles, or titles, is that of providential destination. The Code explains:
“100….attempts have been made to discover titles of more universal application, capable of justifying in all circumstances the subjection of backward peoples. This has led theorists to put forward the idea of the providential destination of the world’s resources, and of the civilizing mission of colonization.”[12]
God has a plan that the earth is to be used to bring forth abundance. After all, in Genesis 1:28-30 upon the creation of the earth, it is written:
“God blessed them, saying: `Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth.’ God also said: `See, I give you every seed-bearing plant all over the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food; and to all the animals of the land, all the birds of the air, and all the living creatures that crawl on the ground, I give all the green plants for food.’”[13]
The Code was a bit more explicit and updates this mandate:
“101. The Creator, who has shared out the riches of this world between the various parts and peoples of the globe, has nevertheless given them for the use of all men. The plan of Divine Providence must be respected, and the various human groups have no right to consider themselves as the sole beneficiaries of the wealth and advantages of the territory they occupy. Thence if follows that an harmonious and fruitful division of labour must be established between the nations in order to place at the disposal of all the members of the human community the resources of each part of the world.
“The divine plan is distorted and humanity frustrated of its due when backward nations, through incapacity, slackness or laziness, fail to develop the potentialities of their territory. As long as there is no authority whose task it is to remedy this disorder, any State, provided it has the means and the will, may undertake this mission and can withdraw if necessary from the native sovereignty the rights which it has provided itself incapable of exercising for the common advantage of all nations.”[14]
Land cannot be allowed to go to waste, to be sterile. Eppstein asks the question and provides the answer in his tour de force, The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations:
“But what of uncultivated, undeveloped land, full of potential wealth but sparsely inhabited only by nomadic tribes? It would be an unreasonable exaggeration of our doctrine of native rights to pretend that, under such circumstances they excluded either the acquisition by the first comer of territory which, not being effectively occupied by any human group is truly res nullius; or the right of all peoples to travel, trade and settle; or to have their share of those good things of earth and sea which are not already the property of others.”[15]
The issue of providential destination arises especially in connection with the presence of a backwards people occupying, or claiming right to, an area. So often mixed in with the question of making fertile the land is the question of civilizing the natives. Civilization may be defined as a “high level of material culture and moral development” and it develops with political groups “which divide the human family” so as “to procure for their members the `full good of human life.’”[16]
The State, as the ultimate authority of a political society, “is called upon to secure for its members all the conditions required for a truly human existence” and provides “those general conditions which will enable each one to attain more easily `the full good of human life’ (St. Thomas). For this reason it exercises sovereign power over the territories under its control.”[17] However, some societies “have not gone very far in the process of civilization.”[18] Therefore these societies without sufficient material and spiritual development, are failing to provide their members those things that are necessary for a truly human existence such that the “full good of human life” is not obtained, society is not fully developed, and the ability of persons to achieve their vocation, or ultimate end, is unsatisfied.[19]
When the native rights clash with humanities’ rights, then the native rights must yield for the betterment of all. This does not mean that injustice may be worked against the natives who have every right to “conserve themselves in being, to develop according to their nature, to associate and to possess property”.[20] In these situations where the land and natural resources are undeveloped by one people, often the level of their development of the natives is less than that of the people of a new nation coming onto their land. Indeed, there is a duty on the more advanced people who have the capabilities to make the land more prosperous for the betterment of humankind, and to help with the development of the backward peoples who many not be putting the land to best or full use.
North America, or at least the area that is the Continental United States, and much of Canada, was one such situation where the natives were primitive or backwards people, and the area effectively res nullius. The situation faced by the Americans was exactly the situation that Catholic tradition, teaching, and doctrine addressed and continues to address. The refusal of Kroc to examine the evidence in accord with Catholic teaching, which is the Natural Law as a minimum, is egregious and should infuriate any American. Such actions by Kroc, while claiming to be Catholic, can only serve to lend support to the idea that Catholics cannot be loyal Americans — but perhaps for a reason different from what is usually understood in this regard. The betrayal of Americans by Catholic leaders consists not in the effort to convert Americans to Catholicism or to right order their society, but to advance the interests of the plutocracy, which is a tyranny, at the expense of the Americans. The betrayal is not in the sense of changing Americans to perfect their character and society, but it is in the order of serving the enemies of God and man which enemies are the lovers of money.
Summary
Before proceeding, let us summarize key points. The goods of the earth are meant for all men. Man has a duty to use creation to provide goods for all men, which is the idea of providential destination. States exist to provide the sum total of conditions needed for members of a society in a certain territory to have a truly human existence, or to insure proper development. Proper development is both material and spiritual (or moral). Levels of civilization are known by the degree of moral and material development of societies. Some societies are more advanced than others, with the latter being known as backwards peoples. The more advanced peoples have a duty to develop the backward peoples.
[1] Lauren Sommer, “A racist past and hotter future are testing Western water like never before,” July 11, 2023, National Public Radio.
[2] See, US Department of Interior, Office of Federal Acknowledgement at https://www.bia.gov/as-ia/ofa accessed August 19, 2023. There is neither mention of the Winnimem Wintu nor of a pending application for recognition.
[3] Shannon Power, “Ben & Jerry’s Video Slammed Amid Boycott Calls — `Bud Light Moment’,” July 10, 2023, Newsweek.
[4] Ariel Zilber, “Ben & Jerry’s Slams Unilever’s sale to Israeli licensee,” June 30, 2022, New York Post, https://nypost.com/2022/06/30/ben-jerrys-slams-parent-company-unilevers-sale-of-ice-cream-brand-to-israeli-licensee/
[5] “About,” Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, https://kroc.nd.edu/about-us/ as accessed August 18, 2023.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] “Peace is the `tranquility of order.’ Peace is the work of justice and the effect of charity.” Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2304; Gaudeam et Spes, section 78, paragraphs 1 and 2.
[10] Code of International Ethics, ed. John Eppstein (Sands & Co., Glasgow, Scotland, 1953), 84-85.
[11] Code of International Ethics, 176-177.
[12] Ibid., 97
[13] Holy Bible (The New American Bible, 1998); Also, see the following in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997): “2401 The seventh commandment forbids unjustly taking or keeping the goods of one’s neighbor and wronging him in any way with respect to his goods…For the sake of the common good, it requires respect for the universal destination of goods and respect for the right to private property. Christian life strives to order this world’s goods to God and to fraternal charity…..2402 In the beginning God entrusted the earth and its resources to the common stewardship of mankind to take care of them, master them by labor, and enjoy their fruits. The goods of creation are destined for the whole human race. However, the earth is divided up among men to assure the security of their lives, endangered by poverty and threatened by violence. The appropriation of property is legitimate for guaranteeing the freedom and dignity of persona and for helping each of them to meet his basic needs and the needs of those in his charge. “
[14] Code of International Ethics, 97-98.
[15] John Eppstein, The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations (Lawbook Exchange Ltd., Clarke, New Jersey, 2012), 410.
[16] Code of International Ethics, p. 94, Section 93.
[17] Code of International Ethics, p. 45, Section 8.
[18] Code of International Ethics, p. 94, Section 93;
[19] “Full good of human life” is a concept akin to development which is used in the Catechism which summarizes in section 2461 the ideas here: “True development concerns the whole man. It is concerned with increasing each person’s ability to respond to his vocation and hence to God’s call [Centesimus Annus, 29].”
[20] Eppstein, The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations, 410.