On July 8, 1921, Minnesota Cooperative Creameries Association, a dairy cooperative, formed for the purpose of marketing their products. They didn't like the name, however, and held a contest that ended up selecting a submission made in 1926, that being Land O Lakes, noting the nature of Minnesota itself, although we don't associate lakes much with dairy. In 1926 the coop received a painting of an Indian woman holding a carton of their butter, looking forward at the viewer, with lakes and forests in the background. They liked it so much they adopted it as their label and while they had it stylized by Jess Betlach, an illustrator, the image itself remained remarkably consistent with the original design, which says something as illustrations by Betlach sometimes approached the cheesecake level and depictions of Indian women in the period often strayed into depictions of European American models instead of real Indian women.
For reasons unknown to me, the depiction of the young Indian women acquired the nickname "Mia" over time.
And now she's been removed from the scene, quite literally.
In 1928 the Land O Lakes dairy cooperative hired an advertising agency to come up with a logo for them. The logo that was produced featured an Indian woman kneeling in front of a lake scene, with forests surrounding the lake, and holding a box of Land O Lakes butter in a fashion that basically depicted the woman offering it to the viewer. From time to time Land O Lakes actually changed the logo on a temporary basis, but it always featured Mia, but not always in the same pose. On at least one occasion she was shown in profile near a lake and seemingly working (churning) something in a pot. On another, she was rowing a canoe.
Frederic Remington nocturn, The Luckless Hunter. This is a fairly realistic depiction of a native hunter in winter, on the typically small range horse of the type actually in use on the Northern Plains.
The adoption of Indian depictions and cultural items as symbols in European American culture goes a long ways back, so Land O Lakes adopting the logo in 1928 was hardly a novelty. In ways that we can hardly grasp now, European American culture began to admire and adopt Indian symbols and depictions even while the armed struggle between the native peoples and European Americans was still going on. Frontiers men dating back all the way to the 18th Century adopted items of native clothing, which may be credited to its utility as much as anything else. In 1826, however, a tribe was romantically treated in Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, which virtually defined the "noble" image of the Indian even as the "savage" image simultaneously kept on keeping on. The popular genre of Western art continued to do the same in the last half of the 19th Century, and often by the same artists (with Russel being an exception, as he always painted natives sympathetically, and Shreyvogel being the counter exception, as always did the opposite). Cities and towns provided an example of this as their European American settlers used Indian geographic names from fairly early on, after the original bunch of European place names and honorifics ceased to become the absolute rule, with some western towns, such as Cheyenne, being named after Indian tribes that were literally being displaced as the naming occured.
William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody and Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, i.e., Sitting Bull, in 1885, the year he joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Sitting Bull received $50.00 per week, as sum that's equivalent to $1,423.00 in current U.S. Dollars. He worked for the show for four months, during which time he made money on the side charging for autographs. This came only nine years after he was present at Little Big Horn and only five years before his death at the hands of Indian Police at age 59, just two weeks before Wounded Knee.
The entire cultural habit took on a new form, however, in the late 19th Century, just as the Frontier closed. Oddly, the blood was hardly frozen at Wounded Knee when a highly romanticized depiction of American Indians began. Starting perhaps even before the last major bloodletting of the Frontier had occurred, it arguably began with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, which employed Indian warriors who had only lately been engaged in combat with the United States.
The principal Indian performers, if we wish to consider them that, were men, as were most of the performers. But women had a role in Wild West shows as well, as did children. As Cody was not unsympathetic to Indians in general, his portrayals of Indian women and children were not likely to have been too excessive, but this is not true of all wild west shows of the era, some of which grossly exaggerated female Indian dress or which dressed them down for exploitative reasons.
Nonetheless, as this occurred, a real romantic view of Plains Indians arose and white performers affected Indian dress or exaggerated Indian dress and an entire romanticization of a people who were still very much alive and not living in the best of circumstances oddly took off. White performers made the circuit performing as romantic Indian couples and an adopted romanticized Indian culture seeped into the general American culture in various ways, including in the form of depictions and ritual.
Camp Fire Girls in 1917. The first half of the 20th Century saw the rise of the scouting movment and in the English speaking world this spread to girls after it has become very successful with boys. The Boy Scout movement had military scouting and hence military men as the model for its idealized muscular Christianity movement, but no such equivalent existed for girls. In the US this came to be compensated for, however, by the adoption of the Indian woman as the model, as she was outdoorsy and rugged by default.
This saw its expression in numerous different ways, including in its incorporation into the Boy Scout inspired female scouting organizations and in popular "Indian maiden" literature. But it also saw the development of the use of depictions of Indians in advertising and popular culture.
Out of uniform Girl Scouts in 1912 in clothing and hair styles that were inspired by presumed native female dress.
In 1901 one of the legendary American motorcycle companies simply named itself "Indian", for example. Savage Firearms named itself that in 1894, with there being no intent to demean Indians but rather to name itself after Indian warriors. Cleveland called its baseball team the "Indians". The NFL being a late comer to American professional sports, the Washington football franchise didn't get around to naming itself the "Redskins" until 1932 in contrast.
The psychology behind this cultural adaption is an interesting one, with a conquering people doing the rare thing of partially co-opting the identify of the conquered people, even as those people remained in a period of trying to adopt to the constantly changing policy of the post frontier American West. Celebrated in their pre conquest state, and subject to any number of experiments in their day to day lives, it was as if there were two different groups of people being dealt with, the theoretical and the real, with the real not doing so well with the treatment they were receiving. Indeed, that's still the case.
Following World War Two this began to be reconsidered, with that reconsideration really setting in during the 1970s. Books and films, and films based on books, that reflected this reconsideration became widely considered. Thomas Berger's brilliant Little Big Man remains in its brilliant and accurate reflection of Plains Indian culture what True Grit is to the culture of the southern American European American West. Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee destroyed any remaining claim the Army had to the event being a battle definitively. The 1973 American Indian Movement occupation of Wounded Knee brought the whole thing into sharp focus. Kids who had gone to school their entire lives with Big Chief writing tablets would finish the decade out with Son Of Big Chief, who looked a lot more like he'd been with AIM at Wounded Knee or maybe even at Woodstock.
American Indian Movement flag.
As this occured, people questioned the old symbols and depictions. But it wasn't really until the late 1990s that the commercial and popular ones began to go.
Slowly, and sometimes controversially, after that time, people began to reconsider the depiction of people it had used in advertising where those people had been minorities. It didn't just apply to Indians, of course, but too all sorts of things. Sombrero wearing Mexican cartoon characters and bandits disappeared from Tex-Mex fast food signs. Quaker Oats' "Aunt Jemima went from being a woman who was clearly associated with Southern household post civil war servants, who had only lately been slaves, in an undoubtedly racist depiction, to being a smiling middle aged African American woman whom Quaker Oats hoped, probably accurately", would cause people to forget what being an "aunt" or "uncle" meant to African Americans. As late as 1946 Mars Inc. would feel free to do something similar but without the racist depiction and use the "uncle" moniker and a depiction of well dressed elderly African American for Uncle Ben's Rice, something they've kept doing as they'd never gone as far as Quaker Oats. And these are just common well known examples. There are leagues of others.
But removing labels and depictions has been slow. The Washington football team remains tagged with the clearly offensive name "the Redskins". Cleveland finally retired the offensive Chief Wahoo from their uniforms only in 2018.
So what about Mia?
She started leaving, sort of, in 2018 when the logo was redesigned so that the knees of the kneeling woman were no longer visible, in part because in the age of easy computer manipulation she became a target for computer pornification by males with a juvenile mindset. That fact, however probably amplified the criticism of the logo itself, which was changed to being just a head and shoulder depiction. Now, she's just gone.
But did that really make sense, or achieve anything, in context?
A literal association between Native Americans and dairy would be odd and was probably never intended. While native agriculture varied widely, no Indian kept cattle until after they'd been introduced by European Americans and cattle are, of course, not native to North America. Indians did adapt to ranching in the West, something that's rarely noted for some reason, and indeed the entire Mexican ranching industry is a mestizo one and therefore a blending of two cultures by definition. On the northern plains some Indians were working as cowboy and even ranchers by the early 20th Century and Southwestern tribes had adopted livestock in the form of sheep by the mid 19th.
But dairy cattle are a different deal and there's no, in so far as I'm aware, Native American association with it. Indeed, 74% of Native Americans are lactose intolerant.* This isn't surprising as its fairly well established that lactose tolerance is a product of evolutionary biology. By and large, the vast majority of cultures have had no reason over time to consume the milk of cattle they were keeping, which were kept first for food, and then for labor, and then as things developed, for labor until they could not, at which time they became food. Milk wasn't high on the list. And for Native Americans, being one of the three inhabited continents in which cattle were not native, it was obviously off the list.**
Some critics have called the imagery racist. North Dakota state Rep. Ruth Buffalo, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, says it goes “hand-in-hand with with human and sex trafficking of our women and girls, by depicting Native women as sex objects". But that comment seems misplaced with this logo. She's definitely not the odd blue eyed "Navajo" woman wearing blue beads that still appears on the doors of the semi tractors of Navajo Express.
Indeed, the irony of Mia is that in her last depictions she was illustrated by Patrick DesJarlait, who was a Red Lakes Ojibwe from Minnesota. He not only painted her, but he painted her wearing an Ojibwe dress. So she was depicted as an Indian woman, by an Indian artist.
It's hard to see a man panting a woman of his own tribe, fully and appropriately dressed, as being a racist or exploitative act.
Indeed, the opposite really seems true. The original dairy co-op was really trying to honor their state in the name and they went the next step and acknowledged the original owners. Mia was the symbol of the original occupants.
And now she's gone, and with that, the acknowledgment of who was there first.
Which doesn't seem like a triumph for Native acknowledgment.
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*As are 70% of African Americans and 15% of European Americans. Surprisingly 53% of Mexican Americans are, in spite of dairy products being common to the Mexican dietary culture. A whopping 95% of Asian Americans are lactose intolerant.
Just recently I've come to the conclusion that I'm somewhat lactose intolerant myself, something I seem to be growing into in old age. Only mildly so, and I've only noticed it recently. My children, however, have problems with dairy. My wife does not. So they must get that via me.
***Cattle are not native to the new world or Australia, but are found just about everywhere else.
