One Minnesota, two flags: The debate still rages

MINNEAPOLIS — A flag is supposed to represent the entire state. Instead, Minnesota is dividing into warring camps, each with its own battle flag.

For the past two years, Minnesota’s official flag has been a bold outline of the state in dark blue, surmounted by an eight-pointed North Star against a background as bright as its sky-blue waters.

That was not the flag hanging behind the Champlin City Council in February as the community debated which flag should fly over their suburb. In the end, Champlin joined the ranks of Minnesota communities reverting to the retired state flag they had displayed in their chambers: a field of deep blue with the old state seal at its center, featuring a farmer tilling his fields as a Native American rides out of the picture.

“That (new) flag was forced upon the people of this state by a communist trifecta in our statehouse,” Everett Jasmer told the council during its flag debate, warning his neighbors that if the town he’s lived in for almost 50 years replaced the retired flag, he might just move elsewhere.

It was a debate that has played out in communities across the state and will play out again on Monday night, when Inver Grove Heights votes whether to fly the new flag on city property.

This is their right, since the State Capitol is the only place the new flag is required by law to fly between sunrise and sunset.

Some Minnesotans had been calling for a new flag for decades, uncomfortable with a state symbol that they saw as bland at a distance and uncomfortable at close range. The new flag flutters from homes across the state. Shops sell state flag coffee mugs and Minnesotans sit for state flag tattoos. Flag sales soared during the ICE surge as some Minnesotans waved the new flag in a show of pride and defiance.

But the old flag still flies over swaths of the state, where residents bristle at a stark change they say they never asked for, voted for or wanted.

It is a startling amount of passion for an old flag that looks much like 20 other state flags, including Wisconsin and both Dakotas: a state seal on a field of blue. In flag design circles, these flags are known derisively as SOBs — seals on a bedsheet. The old flag had been known to fly upside-down over the state Legislature, because it was hard to tell the difference. Both Utah and Mississippi also changed their flags in the last few years — in Mississippi’s case, replacing one that included the Confederate battle emblem.

The image on Minnesota’s former flag, drawn from the old territorial seal, was designed to emphasize that this is white man’s land now. The people they were displacing, the people who gave Minnesota its name, were no longer welcome. A point that Mary Eastman, whose husband sketched the original design, emphasized with a poem.

“The Red Man’s course is onward,” she wrote when her husband’s sketch became the territorial seal in 1849. Minnesota would not get around to designing a state flag until almost half a century later. “And Minnesota’s land/Must pass with all its untold wealth/To the white man’s grasping hand.”

After decades of talk, the state decided to do something about the flag in 2023. A call went out for flag redesign submissions. In a matter of months, the State Emblems Redesign Commission — made up of a dozen voting members, as well as nonvoting Republican and Democratic legislators — whittled down a list of more than 2,000 submissions for a new flag and a new state seal.

The new state seal, which hasn’t attracted as much criticism, replaced the farmer with a loon rising from a lake.

The flag backlash began before the new one flew over Minnesota for the first time on Statehood Day, May 11, 2024. None of the Republicans on the redesign commission had supported the redesign and the Minnesota GOP soon launched a Save Our Flag page and sold “Don’t PC Our Flag” merchandise.

Every time a new community voted to revert to the old flag — St. Francis, Champlin, Ham Lake, Columbus, Zumbrota, North Branch, Detroit Lakes, Pine Island, Crosslake, Babbitt, Wadena, Elk River — GOP leadership cheered. There may be more to come, but a spokesman for the League of Minnesota Cities said “we are not tracking this and have no involvement in the issue.”

“The City of Elk River has voted to restore Minnesota’s old state flag,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., posted on social media after last week’s vote, “which is a much better representation of our state than woke Tim Walz’s flag that resembles that of a certain East African country.”

Opponents of the new flag have criticized the speed of its adoption, the lack of input from the Legislature or the voters, and the erasure of a piece of Minnesota history. But most of all, they complain that it looks just like the flag of Somalia — a five-pointed star on a field of baby blue.

That comes as news to the Luverne, Minn., artist who designed the flag, Andrew Prekker.

“As a graphic designer, I struggle to keep my eye from twitching when anyone insinuates the flags have any similarity,” he joked in a written response to questions about the controversy.

The flags feature different stars and different shades of blue. If you want to see a flag that was actually designed to look like the flag of another nation, look south. Iowa’s state flag is a deliberate homage to the French tricolor.

Prekker spent hours researching vexillology; the principles and history of flag design. A well-designed flag should be unique, use just a few colors and no words, and be so simple a child could draw it on an index card.

He drafted at least 50 flag designs before settling on three to submit.

“For me the flag has always represented unity, equality, freedom, pride, progress, hope and strength,” he said.

Around Prekker’s home in southwest Minnesota, old flags fly freely; although he says he has seen an increasing number of new flags in Luverne. He tries not to take the criticism personally, and continues to design new flags that celebrate Minnesota. His latest features the laser loon, which also emerged as a symbol of protest during the surge.

Anita Gaul, a history instructor at Minnesota West Community & Technical College in Worthington, was a member of the Emblems Redesign Commission. She spent months deliberating over the new state flag, then spent the next two years explaining it.

Again and again, she explains to critics that, yes, Minnesotans didn’t get a vote on the new flag. But Minnesotans didn’t get to weigh in on any of the past flag designs either.

The entire process — including the 2,100 proposals for a new flag and 400 designs for a new state seal — played out in public, she said. More than 20,000 Minnesotans weighed in with public feedback. In the end, the commission backed a modified version of Prekker’s flag by a vote of 11-1.

After statehood, the Minnesota Legislature voted for a new state seal. Then-Gov. Henry Sibley ignored them. Minnesota continued to use the old territorial seal, with its farmer and Indian.

“At no point did any Minnesotan have any say in the creation of the seal,” said Gaul, recently named Educator of the Year by the Minnesota State board of trustees.

But controversy is nothing new in flag redesign. The flag of Canada used to be the British Union Jack. The 1964 flag redesign sparked a debate so ugly it led to fistfights, death threats and years of fury over the new “rag of a flag” — the maple leaf.

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