The Vanishing Indian
How ethnic stereotypes were dealt with in the past.
I’ve always been interested in what I can best call “counterstories.”
Counterstories are those stories that everyone is looking at, but where one or two writers look at things from a different angle than the rest of the news media. The recent decision by the owners of the Cleveland Indians to retire the name and the logo, reminded me of two counterstories that took place earlier in the year.
In April, Land O Lakes removed the sitting native woman that graced their products for decades. The reason is what you would expect, that the image was considered demeaning to Native Americans. An indigenous lawmaker from North Dakota went as far as saying the young maiden was responsible for Native women being sex trafficked.
What most people didn’t know is that the current version of this young woman was designed by an Ojibwe man from Minnesota. His son, Robert DesJarlait, explains in an opinion piece written for the Washington Post:
After I was born in 1946, my family moved from Red Lake, Minn., to Minneapolis, where my father broke racial barriers by establishing himself as an American Indian commercial artist in an art world dominated by white executives and artists. In addition to the Mia redesign, his many projects included…
