Written by Sophie Auerbach
We are living in an historical moment when representations – statues, public murals, monuments, and more – have become contested objects. Too often, the meaning in these objects have been shaped by dominant narratives and have reflected popular stereotypes. Today, they are the objects of criticism and protest, particularly pushed forward by BIPOC people.
In April of 2020, Land O’Lakes company – which is based in Minneapolis-St. Paul — dropped Mia, the Native American women on the front of their packaging and replaced the logo with non-native imagery. The Land O’Lakes decision became the subject of intense debate, with some praising the decision and others threatening to boycott the brand.
As a student at Macalester College, I took a class titled Native Americans in Popular Culture and a few weeks ago the Land O’Lakes controversy was our topic of discussion. Land O’Lakes isn’t the only company to change their logo. After years of protest, the Pearl Milling Company removed Aunt Jemima from their packaging in February 2021. In May 2021, Uncle Ben’s became Ben’s Original. Following the rebranding decisions of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben’s came similar changes in the packaging of Mrs. Buttersworth’s pancake syrup and Cream of Wheat.
The CEO and President of Land O’Lakes commented that the change in packaging was to realign their logo with “the foundation and heart of our company culture—and nothing does that better than our farmer-owners whose milk is used to produce Land O’Lakes’ dairy products.”
The late Ojibwe artist, Patrick DesJarlait, was the designer who had created Mia. His son, Robert, has written an opinion piece arguing that Mia never was a stereotype. Robert DesJarlait wrote that the stereotype people saw was problematic, not the packaging itself.
I came to ESFL one Thursday morning with these articles fresh in my mind and took my place at my table and began working. I looked up an hour later and came face to face with three prints of Patrick Desjarlait’s paintings. You can imagine my shock at discovering art by the designer of the image of a Native American woman on the butter box, the same artist we were going to talk about in class. I could not contain my excitement and ran over to where Peter Rachleff, one of ESFL’s co-directors, was working to share what I had discovered.
Three prints of Patrick Desjarlait’s paintings at ESFL
Almost immediately I began looking more into the life of Patrick DesJarlait. High on the shelves of ESFL, I found a copy of his autobiography titled Patrick DesJarlait: Conversations with a Native American Artist recorded by Neva Williams. Sitting under three of his prints, I learned more about his early life.
Patrick DesJarlait was born in Red Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota in 1921. Patrick was a member of the Chippewa Nation, more commonly known as the Objibwe. In Red Lake, commercial fishing was an important industry; Patrick DesJarlait’s first painting in his signature style is titled “Red Lake Fishermen” and shows the fishermen he grew up around. As a child, DesJarlait would sketch the activities of people working at the Maple Sugar camp, where people would harvest sap and make maple syrup and maple candies; he was nicknamed “little boy with the pencil.”
During the 1920s, government-run and church-run schools were the main education for Native Americans at Red Lake. DesJarlait first attended St. Mary’s Mission Boarding School, which was operated by the Christian church. The school imposed strict rules and often restricted activities and traditions related to Chippewa culture at Red Lake. DesJarlait later reflected about his experience in his autobiography: “By imposing these restrictions, the school hoped to encourage us to accept the white people’s way of life.”
Boarding schools for Indigenous children were designed during the era of assimilation policies in the U.S. In 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania became the first boarding school to open in the U.S. Captain Richard Henry Pratt, superintendent of the Carlisle boarding school, stated that the goal was to “kill the Indian in order to save the man.” (Trauer, 138). Boarding schools across the United States and Canada forcibly took Indiginous children away from their homes in an effort to assimilate the Indigenous population to White culture.
Poor nutrition and diseases often ran rampant and claimed the lives of many children. Physical and sexual abuse was also often reported. In 1899, the commissioner of Indian Affairs defended this deplorable treatment of Native American children by stating that the “education policy is based on the well known inferiority of the great mass of Indians in religion, intelligence, morals, and home life” (Trauer, 138).
This education system (which ended roughly in 1980) recently made headlines when unmarked graves were discovered at the sites of these boarding schools in Canada. According to ABC News, “751 unmarked graves were found at the cemetery of the former Marieval Indian Residential School.” At Kamloops Indian Residential school, ground penetrating radar discovered the remains of 215 children. The practice boarding schools created generations of Indigenous children cut-off from their cultures and families. Parents of children who died in these schools were rarely, if ever, informed of their children’s deaths. The devastating effects of the policies of the boarding schools are still felt today.
DesJarlait attended two other government-run boarding schools before graduation from Red Lake Senior High School, Red Lake’s first public school, in 1939. After graduation, DesJarlait received a year’s scholarship at Arizona State College and moved to Phoenix, Arizona to pursue his art. In 1942, DesJarlait worked as the art director at a Japanese relocation camp at Poston, Arizona. DesJarlait worked in the camp for about six months before receiving orders to join the U.S. Navy in San Diego.
Following the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, racial tensions and prejudice and war hysteria intensified. This resulted in the forced removal of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry from their homes in what became the “largest single forced relocation in U.S. history” (Confinement and Ethnicity, pg. 25).
Located in the Japanese American Citizens League Collection at ESFL is a book titled Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites. Looking through this book, I learned more about the camp where DesJarlait taught art classes. The Poston Relocation Center was located on the Colorado River Reservation in Arizona, despite opposition from the Tribal Council on the “grounds that they did not want to participate in inflicting the same type of injustice as they had suffered” (pg. 215). Poston was named after the first superintendent for Indian Affairs in Arizona, Charles Debrille Poston, who was responsible for the creation of the Colorado River Indian Reservation.
Poston was arranged into three separate camps, and named according to their numbers. Also held at ESFL is the book titled Poston Camp II, Block 211 by Jack Matusuoka. This book features a collection of cartoons detailing daily life at the Poston detention camp drawn between 1942 and 1945 when the author was detained there as a teenager with his family.
In San Diego, DesJarlait spent three years working with animation artists to create instructional films for the Navy Visual Aids department. It was in San Diego that Desjarlait cultivated his unique art style and learned the inner-workings of commercial art. His first art gallery was at the Fine Arts Gallery in San Diego and sold every painting.
In addition to his own art, DesJarlait continued working with commercial art. Mia, the “butter maiden” on the front of Land O’Lakes packaging, is one of his works. He also worked on the Hamm’s Bear for Hamm’s Brewery, which he considered “one of his most delightful accomplishments in commercial art” in his autobiography.
DesJarlait painted with watercolors, but used very little water, in order to keep the colors vibrant. Each brushstroke was carefully placed. In 1971 DesJarlait was diagnosed with cancer and when he passed away in November 1972, he was buried with his favorite paint brush placed in his breast pocket.
The day I discovered Patrick’s paintings in front of my work station at ESFL, I took photos and brought them to class with me. Have you ever had the experience where you learned about something and then it just kept popping up everywhere? Peter told me this phenomenon was called synchronicity – not to be confused with synchronous events amid the pandemic. Coming to the East Side Freedom Library, my life has been filled with this synchronicity. The ability to make connections and relations with what I do and where I go to school and where I live has been a great experience for me.
Sophie Auerbach