Land O’Lakes finally drops Native American ‘maiden’ from packaging

It’s taken nearly 100 years, but the Land O’Lakes company has finally removed the image of a kneeling Native American woman—nicknamed “Mia”—from its packaging. While the company announced in February that it would be updating its product design to reflect that it is “farmer-owned,” it made no mention of Mia’s upcoming disappearance.

Advocates against using Native American imagery on random products and sports teams have been pointing out for years that such depictions are demeaning or racist and welcomed this advertising change.

Kevin Allis, the chief executive of the National Congress of American Indians, a public education and advocacy group, told The New York Times that the organization saw the Land O’Lakes redesign as a “positive sign.” “We encourage all companies that peddle products displaying stereotypical Native ‘themed’ imagery to follow suit,” he said.

Among various detrimental consequences, using stereotypical Native American images in advertising or for sports teams “appears to have a negative impact on the self-esteem of American Indian children,” according to the American Psychological Association, which “supports and recommends the immediate retirement of American Indian mascots, symbols, images, and personalities by schools, colleges, universities, athletic teams, and organizations.”

The kneeling Native American “maiden” (as Mia was known) underwent a makeover in 2018 to focus on the woman’s head and shoulders and remove the rest of her kneeling body, which had been manipulated across social media into lewd imagery. The original logo was designed in 1928 by Arthur C. Hanson, an artist who worked for a Minnesota advertising firm.

Not only did many Native Americans find the Land O’Lakes maiden racist, but some saw a clear link to the exploitation of Native women. The packaging, said North Dakota state Rep. Ruth Buffalo, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, went “hand-in-hand with human and sex trafficking of our women and girls, by depicting Native women as sex objects,” the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported.

For decades, sports teams in particular have faced opposition. In 2019, Maine because the first state to fully ban the use of Native American mascots in public high school and college sports teams. The tribal ambassador for the Penobscot Nation in Maine, Maulian Dana, told the Times in May 2019 that the law “sends a message of truth and honor and respect.”

“It is part of a big picture of historical oppression of Indigenous people,” Dana said. “When you see people as less than people, you treat them accordingly. That actually points to the very core of it, is that they make us invisible and turn us into stereotypes.”

Still, despite the ongoing controversy, some professional sports teams still use Native American mascots—for example, the Atlanta Braves, the Washington Redskins, the Chicago Blackhawks, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the Cleveland Indians. And many sports fans don’t hesitate to do what’s known as the “tomahawk chop” and “war chants” at games.

New research out in February from the University of Michigan shows that about two-thirds of Native Americans who frequently engage in tribal and cultural are offended by these acts and team mascots—and images that still adorn brands like Natural American Spirit cigarettes.

“Native people are not mascots or logos,” Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota, who is a citizen of the White Earth Nation of Ojibwe, said on Twitter. “We are very much still here.”