White Americans and Mascot Culture

A version of the controversial logo, discontinued earlier this month

Land O’Lakes, the Minnesota-based agricultural cooperative that’s currently approaching its centennial of providing good-paying work to Great Plains dairy farmers, has officially discontinued its “Indian maiden” mascot. Nicknamed “Maiden Mia,” the character has adorned branded packaging in some form since 1928. Given that corporations don’t change logos lightly, because buyers invest emotional capital, I assume they gave this choice serious deliberation. Still, some customers have flipped their lids.

I find myself in a precarious position. I understand why critics disparage Maiden Mia, a cliché of long buckskin fringe and brightly colored beads. Like the “buffalo nickel” logo still displayed by the NFL’s Washington, D.C., franchise, Maiden Mia isn’t herself directly harmful to anybody, but she still normalizes broad stereotypes which reduce entire populations to a mere category. That is, she didn’t hurt anybody, but she numbed audiences to other, more palpable harms.

However, I also understand why butter-buying markets take umbrage at sudden changes. Even people who don’t embrace racism and stereotyping, nevertheless have the natural human tendency to prefer continuity. Corporations tie their names and identities to certain branded images, and when those images change, buyers often perceive the product itself as having changed, because the prior standard remains imprinted on our neurons. Changing buying habits means changing our brains.

Over twenty years ago, Naomi Klein described the ways logos become part of consumer culture’s shared heritage. She described people having, for instance, the Nike swoosh tattooed on their bodies—literally allowing themselves to be branded. Many logos and images remain technically copyrighted to corporations and institutions, like the Chevrolet cross, McDonalds’ “Golden Arches,” or Barack Obama’s campaign logo, have nevertheless become part of wider American culture.

This tendency to absorb corporations’ identities into our shared community is compounded by the fact that many White Americans, like me, are estranged from our ancestry. My grandmother, born on a Nebraska homestead, recounted a childhood experience: her schoolteacher assigned students to ask their parents about their ethnic heritage. Her parents responded: “You tell them you’re American, and that’s all that matters!” She had any pre-American ancestry basically whitewashed away.

Thousands of native women have gone missing but the only one some white Americans care about is the one on the Land-O-Lakes package. pic.twitter.com/IvjPaRnI6u

— Dr Strange PhD🔬😺🐾🌊 (@CeeEyes) April 26, 2020

Most of my heritage remains opaque to me. I know my ancestry is broadly Northern and Western European; to the best of my knowledge, I can’t claim the ultimate badge of White cultural smartness, because I have no known Black or Native American ancestry. But I can’t tell you much about where my ancestors came from. They crossed to America and abandoned their homelands, replacing their past identities with what W.E.B. DuBois called “the wage of whiteness.”

It bears noting that American culture conquers without regard for skin color. Our mythology elevates Native virtues, White homesteader work ethic, or African American folk culture, only after driving these peoples off their lands. In many ways, White Americans have been colonized as thoroughly as Black and Native Americans, if less visibly. The centralized hierarchy lionized our history only after dispossessing our ancestors. Basically, it’s easy to hero-worship the dead.

Without any heritage of our own, White Americans embrace a portmanteau culture. We eat Mexican food, pizza, and soul food; we listen to blues, Highland Flings, and hillbilly spirituals. To be American means living from a suitcase stuffed with multiple cultural heritages, some of which is probably our own. Black Americans had much of their heritage destroyed by the ravages of slavery, but White Americans abandoned ours on Ellis Island.

This leads to complications when dealing with brand-name ethnic stereotypes. I believe White Americans, when they embrace characters like Maiden Mia or Native American sports mascots, sincerely mean no offense. We embrace aspects of Native culture they find admirable, including warriors’ bravery and Plains Indians’ reverence for the land. We embrace this culture because, essentially, we have none of our own.

Therefore, I think White Americans ought to have access to this portmanteau culture, provided they’re willing to accept guidance and chastisement from the peoples we borrow from. The problem becomes most pointed when for-profit organizations, like ag cooperatives and the NFL, slap trademarks on cultures they’ve looted. When this happens, the heritage White people borrow stops being something other cultures share, and becomes something rapacious capitalists sell.

So I understand why many White Americans feel cheated by Maiden Mia’s retirement. Some piece of our portmanteau culture no longer exists. Yet she was never, really, ours, nor did she belong to the Native Americans whose culture she ransacked. She was something sold to us by corporations, which never necessarily had our best interests at heart.