With little fanfare, the Land O’ Lakes dairy co-operative, a major producer of milk, butter, and cheese in the Upper Midwest, which saw $14 billion in revenues last year, quietly dropped from its packaging the image of a Native American woman. The imagery had been a part of its branding for over nine decades.
“Mia, the butter maiden”, as she was known, made her first appearance on Land O’ Lakes packaging in 1928. She was the creation of the same advertising agency that gave the world Betty Crocker.
Company executives provided the following statement as to why they made the change:
“As Land O’Lakes looks toward our 100th anniversary, we’ve recognized we need packaging that reflects 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,” said Beth Ford, president and CEO, in a statement. “As a farmer-owned co-op, we strongly feel the need to better connect the men and women who grow our food with those who consume it.”
There have been calls over the years for the company to bring an end to the use of Mia. As the on-line journal, The Minnesota Reformer noted;
The American Psychological Association in 2005 called for all American Indian mascots to be retired, citing a large body of social science research showing how racial stereotypes and inaccurate representations harm Native young people’s self-esteem and social identity.
The logo was also long the subject of snickering and sexual humor. How, you might wonder?
...boys and men would fold the package so it made the maiden’s knees look like bare breasts. For them, it was a joke to do something demeaning and sexualized to an image of a smiling Native woman.
No joke. Saw it done many times.
The end of Mia did not go un-noticed, despite the company’s quiet way they went about the move.
“It’s a great move,” said Adrienne Keene, a professor at Brown University, author of the popular Native Appropriations blog and citizen of the Cherokee Nation. “It makes me really happy to think that there’s now going to be an entire generation of folks that are growing up without having to see that every time they walk in the grocery store.”
But Keene thinks the company missed an important opportunity in not explaining why they removed the image of the Indian maiden from their brand.
“It could have been a very strong and positive message to have publicly said, ‘We realized after a hundred years that our image was harmful and so we decided to remove it,’” Keene said. “In our current cultural moment, that’s something people would really respond to.”