Until the late 1870s, American beer was advertised almost entirely using the written word or very simple images. Newspaper ads described the product and how to procure the beer, along with occasional claims about the quality of the beverage. Fancier ads were adorned by a sketch of a keg or three. The limited point-of-sale advertising above the entrance to a saloon usually featured a monogram logo or a frothing glass with the name of the brewery.
But the advent of the widespread availability of bottled Lager beer, as well as the expanding markets created by regional and national shipping breweries, made branding much more important. Even so, the earliest labels for beer bottles usually just featured the brewery’s name and location along with a simple logo, because the most important reason for labeling a bottle was so the brewery could get it back again.
As competition among breweries became more important, and as lithography became more affordable, printing companies began to create miniature works of art for the bottles. Labels and other new advertising pieces, such as metal signs and trays, displayed German castles or images of the brewery itself. Goats advertised Bock beer; depictions of attractive women were used to promote beer of all types. Pictures of monks or groups of revelers enjoying beer in an old-world setting were common, and King Gambrinus occasionally appeared to bless the proceedings.
Appeals to history and symbols of purity were presented as a guarantee of quality. And in the United States, that meant beer businesses took advantage of a particular subject matter designed to conjure that history and purity: the American Indian.
The history of the interactions between Indigenous people and European traders and settlers in what is now the United States is so much more complex than the oft-repeated, historically flattened stories of pilgrim feasts and “cowboys and Indians” could ever reveal. As historian Angie Debo wrote in A History of the Indians of the United States, the early reaction of Native people to European explorers fell into a general pattern: “[F]riendly curiosity and helpfulness, then, with greater experience, deepening distrust and active hostility.”
[Editor’s note: This article contains references to physical violence.]
The hostility often turned into active resistance against white settlement, and conflicts such as the Pequot War of the 1630s, Pontiac’s War of the 1760s, and the Dakota War of 1862 represented uprisings against the imposition of colonial policies and violence.
Beyond those individual conflicts, broader genocide was also committed against American Indians, including the expulsion of Native people from their homes (events which were collectively known as the Trail of Tears); the attempts to “Kill the Indian and Save the Man” made through Indian boarding schools; and massacres at places like Sand Creek, Colorado, and Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
Structural violence was also endemic. Treaties between Indigenous nations and the United States government were one-sided; ultimately, the U.S. broke every one of the 369 treaties signed between 1789 and 1877. Later, white-written histories of American Indians warped or ignored these realities. Instead, in these revised narratives, Indians fought fiercely but were inevitably defeated by European settlers and the United States military, and faded before Manifest Destiny and the march of civilization. Indian names remained on the landscape, but the people themselves were treated as relics of a bygone age.
It’s within this context that American Indians began to adorn beer labels and other assorted products. When modern advertising of consumer goods began, Indian identity was simplified and caricatured and, despite all the nuance and complexity of the real relationships between American Indians and white settlers, became an iconographic shorthand and a popular way to claim virtue for any given product by association.
The use of American Indian imagery by manufacturers and retailers to identify and promote their wares was not limited to beer, or even to alcohol. Tobacco products of all types took advantage of the historical tradition in which Native people introduced smoking to European settlers, especially the English. This connection was appropriated for brand names, package decorations, and point-of-sale advertisements, including the once-ubiquitous “cigar store Indian.” In the mid-20th century, Pontiac automobiles’ hood ornaments featured a stylized Indian head. Many agricultural products used Native imagery—including Land O’Lakes butter, Calumet baking powder, and Mazola corn oil. Patent medicines of the 19th century additionally used the lore of Native people to sell their wares—especially those that claimed their unique properties came from ingredients supposedly known only to the ancient peoples of the land.
Choosing such depictions to symbolize natural purity has its roots with French philosophers of the 17th century. Some critics of modern society relied on the theory of primitivism—the idea that there had once been a Golden Age when all was in harmony. The actual discovery in America of people who appeared to live simply and in accord with nature seemed to confirm their view.
With the rapid industrialization of the late 19th century and the resulting disturbances of life, the Indian was again used to symbolize what was lost. The appearance of Indians in advertising was designed to channel an almost magical connection to the land that stood in contrast to the new marketplace in which producers became ever more distant from consumers.
The link between Native people to nature and a supposed “Golden Age” additionally informed the concept of the “Noble Savage.” Developed by French enlightenment writers, the idea was most popular in the United States during the 19th century. As historian Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. noted in The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present, this archetype not only gave Americans a classical past to draw upon, it also sanctioned the removal of Native peoples from the landscape, and locked those who remained in a historical past that did not resemble their modern lives.
To some artists and designers, particularly those trained in classical subjects and allegorical deities like Liberty and Justice, Native people served as an embodiment of the spirit of the American soil, and stood in for Greek and Roman imagery. America didn’t have Muses, Spartans, or Rhine maidens, so artists reached for “pure” Indian maidens and “noble” chiefs. The Greek, Roman, and Germanic heroes of classical tales were a relic of the past—cast aside when no longer needed—and so, they thought, were the Indigenous people of America.
How prevalent has the use of American Indian imagery in beer advertising been? An extensive though by no means exhaustive survey of labels, coasters, signs, newspaper ads, and other “breweriana” (any item with a brewery’s name or a beer brand name on it) shows that nearly half the states (and all the major brewing states) had at least one brewery that used Native imagery for identification or advertising. Nearly 100 breweries portrayed American Indians in logos or other illustrative contexts—mostly in the pre-Prohibition era, and almost exclusively in the pre-craft era. They appeared far less often than appeals to German or English tradition, but were still prevalent enough to be significant and worthy of study.
Such depictions varied from simple trademarks to broad branding campaigns. Dozens of breweries featured Indian heads as a logo or trademark. Most of these were male images, though a few were female, such as on Indian Queen Ale (1933-52) from John Hohenadel Brewing Co. of Philadelphia or the longest-lived Indian logo, that of Leinenkugel Brewing Co. of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin from 1933 to 2020.
“The use of Native stereotypes, whether done out of malice or ignorance, is part of a process of othering that flattens and dehumanizes American Indians. Communications professor Jason Edward Black argued in ‘The ‘Mascotting’ of Native America: Construction, Commodity, and Assimilation’ that this abuse of identity is ‘a signifying practice that bolsters white power and weakens Indigenous power .. [P]ower resides in naming and co-opting a marginalized identity.’”
Other times, Native people were depicted in stereotypical versions of daily activities—cooking, canoeing, or riding horses. Two different breweries in Portage, Wisconsin used illustrations of Native people carrying their canoes over the portage that gave the city its name. In other cases, Indians were shown in situations that emphasized their subordinate role in modern America—contemplating the march of white settlers across the countryside or even, in at least one case, admiring the brewery from a nearby hill.
Breweries sometimes adopted or adapted existing artworks for their advertising pieces. People’s Brewing Co. of Duluth, Minnesota, used a painting by C.M. Russell, one of the best-known white artists of the 19th-century American West, for an advertising piece in the 1940s. Perhaps the most famous such appropriation was by what was then called the Anheuser Busch Brewing Association. Adolphus Busch acquired the original painting of “Custer’s Last Fight” by Cassilly Adams in the 1890s and had the Milwaukee Lithographing & Engraving Company create thousands of prints to be displayed in Anheuser Busch saloons and other locations around the county.
One such work was particularly disturbing. The Standard Brewing Company of Mankato, Minnesota (1900-1908) released a round metal tray featuring a well-known illustration depicting the mass execution in Mankato of 38 Dakota men in the aftermath of the Dakota War of 1862. They also created a larger rectangular sign that added three U.S. soldiers observing the scene from an anachronistic porch, with empty kegs and cases of Standard Lager nearby. In this work, the genocidal, white supremacist gaze was personified by those viewers, and Standard Lager openly framed as its accessory.
In what seems like a rare case of acknowledging harm to Native peoples while still viewing them as an “other” with special powers, local tradition holds that these advertising pieces led to a “curse” on the brewery, which was manifested in a train wreck that destroyed carloads of bottles heading to the brewery and the closing of the business a few years later.
The use of Native stereotypes, whether done out of malice or ignorance, is part of a process of othering that flattens and dehumanizes American Indians. Communications professor Jason Edward Black argued in “The ‘Mascotting’ of Native America: Construction, Commodity, and Assimilation” that this abuse of identity is “a signifying practice that bolsters white power and weakens Indigenous power .. [P]ower resides in naming and co-opting a marginalized identity.” Speaking of advertising generally, Professor S. Elizabeth Bird noted in “Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture” that, “However they are pictured, Indians are the quintessential Other, whose role is to be the object of the white, colonialist gaze. Once Indians were no longer a threat, they became colorful and quaint.” And once they were relegated to this status, it was acceptable to depict them in a way designed to appeal to white consumers.
Unsurprisingly, the Native people shown in these logos and advertisements were usually generic stereotypes, but occasionally specific individuals featured. In several of these cases, the images and names of those people were even trademarked by the companies in question. (While images of presidents and other famous people were trademarked, these were not cases of cultural appropriation—using imagery or objects of one culture by another for profit without consent.)
While the much-altered story of Pocahontas was celebrated even during her lifetime, Berkhofer noted that she was one of the “many famous Indians of the past [who] were revived as noble figures in the literature influenced by cultural nationalism during the first half of the nineteenth century.” Such a famous person could certainly be used to draw attention to a beer and, indeed, she appeared on the pre-Prohibition labels of Bluefield Brewing Co. of Bluefield, West Virginia. (In this case, it is likely that the brand also identified with the nearby Pocahontas coal mine.)
As with Pocahontas, businesses were trademarking a whitewashed legend rather than the historic person. The Kittanning Brewing Co. of that city in Pennsylvania featured a logo identified as Chief Jacobs, who was a leader of the Delaware during the 1750s. The company’s letterhead casts him as a peaceful and noble leader, but that flattening conceals the violent truth. Jacobs, whose Delaware name was Tewea and who was actually known to settlers as Captain Jacobs, led forces against English settlements and forts several times and was killed in battle, after which he was scalped and his head was severed and sent to Philadelphia as a trophy.
Perhaps the best-known individual Indian in beer advertising was Chief Oshkosh, whose image was central in the labels and advertising of the Oshkosh Brewing Company of Wisconsin from its founding in 1894 through its closure in 1971. It wasn’t just the brewery—Oshkosh’s image, usually wearing a top hat based on a daguerreotype from 1855, was also used on cigar boxes, souvenir spoons, and for other purposes in the city. According to historian Lee Reiherzer, Oshkosh, a leader of the Menominee people, died in 1858 from injuries suffered in a fight with two of his sons. But four decades later, actual details about his life were ignored and replaced with a generic myth about the “noble savage.” As with many of these stories, the lore gets in the way of verifiable facts. The company later claimed Oshkosh himself visited the brewery and was persuaded to dress in white clothing for the photo, but he died decades before the brewery was built.
The company first used the logo for general purposes, but during Prohibition it introduced a near beer using the name, and upon the re-legalization of beer in 1933, Chief Oshkosh became the company’s flagship product. Eventually the original image of Oshkosh was replaced with stereotypical Indian illustrations, or even cartoon depictions of Indian boys to advertise the smaller Cub bottles. After crosstown rival Peoples Brewing Company bought Oshkosh Brewing, it retained the Chief Oshkosh brand and advertised it in one of its point-of-sale pieces with a white female model dressed in a feathered headdress.
With the exception of Pocahontas, Native women depicted in beer advertising were allegorical figures rather than specific women. These women typically displayed a mix of European and Indian features, and were clothed in some version of Native garb. Well, sometimes clothed. While most were modestly attired, some were depicted in a sexualized fashion with one or both breasts showing. Even when her full breasts were not displayed, her bare shoulders hinted at what lay behind the brand name or below the edge of the frame.
The late English professor Jeffrey Steele, in “Reduced to Images: American Indians in Nineteenth-Century Advertising,” argues that such images represent “‘the colonized world as the feminine,’ the exploitable bounties of nature are associated with the eroticized image of a Native woman from a dominated race.”
“‘However they are pictured, Indians are the quintessential Other, whose role is to be the object of the white, colonialist gaze. Once Indians were no longer a threat, they became colorful and quaint.’”
It’s worth noting that pre-Prohibition beer advertising also depicted white women in a similar fashion. These were allegorical or mythical figures such as the nymphs used in some late 19th- and early 20th-century Schlitz advertising, Rhine maidens, or the legendary German siren Lorelei. It is likely that the painters of the Native women used in brewery advertising considered women of lore such as Winona, who plunged to her death rather than marry against her will, to be the local equivalent of the women well-known to European settlers.
However, there was a key distinction: While European figures were usually assumed to be beyond the reach of the viewer, non-white women were portrayed as conquerable.
By the late 19th century, however, breweries needed to advertise to women, not just with women, because women were in charge of ordering a significant portion of the beer consumed in households. Images of fashionably dressed women had a much broader appeal to such shoppers than scantily dressed temptresses. But beer was still marketed primarily to men, and has continued to do so with appeals to sex, through the “pin-up girl” era of the 1940s and up to today.
While the deliberations on why certain breweries decided to appropriate Indian imagery are mostly lost to history, it is possible to draw some conclusions about why these campaigns were adopted. In a few cases, the brewery was located in a city or region that retained a version of the name given by the Native people, or was named after the people from whom the land was swindled—a Washington state brand called Yakima Chief or an Indian logo for Sioux City Brewing Co. of Iowa therefore drew upon an existing identity.
The same was true for breweries in cities named after vanquished Native leaders. In addition to Chief Oshkosh, Chief Keokuk was used in a logo for beers from the Pechstein & Nagel brewery in Keokuk, Iowa, and Chief Mishicott served the same purpose for the brewery in his namesake town in Wisconsin. Some breweries with limited advertising budgets chose a stock illustration they liked from a manufacturer rather than commissioning their own art.
One brewer who did actively commission Indian-related artwork was Rudolph F. Haffenreffer of the Narragansett Brewing Co. in Cranston, Rhode Island. Haffenreffer was known for his fascination with Indian lore, and was a collector of artifacts and of “cigar store Indian” sculptures. Narragansett hired Theodore Geisel—now better known as Dr. Seuss—who had gone to Dartmouth with some of the Haffenreffer family, to create a new mascot, Chief Gansett. The Chief, who appeared in advertising in 1941 and 1942, was patterned on the cigar store Indians in the Haffenreffer collection but with characteristics that would later become famous in Dr. Seuss’ children’s books.
One of the few cases in which anything was recorded about the decision to adopt Indian imagery is that of the woman who adorned Leinenkugel labels from 1933 until the beginning of 2021. In an interview given for a publication celebrating the brewery’s 125th anniversary in 1992, former brewery president Bill Leinenkugel recalled that, “Originally it was felt that with a name like Chippewa’s Pride, it wouldn’t mean much without an Indian on our label.”
The company had previously featured American Indian women in advertising pieces. For calendars in the early 1900s, it chose a stock painting (used by other breweries as well) with a more sexualized version of the portrait adapted for the 1933 logo. Even earlier, a lithograph from the 1890s featured a young woman seductively posed in a canoe perched on top of the falls that gave the city their name. The logo changed only slightly during its nearly nine decades of use—according to Bill Leinenkugel, this was because customers told the brewery’s distributors that they liked the old-fashioned look and the distributors “kept telling us not to change it … not ever. So we never did.” However, the very fact that he mentioned this suggests that the logo was being called into question in the 1970s and 1980s.
In July 2020, the company announced that it was retiring the Maiden and would adopt a modernized version of its pre-Prohibition waterfall logo. Current president Dick Leinenkugel issued a statement which said, “For 88 years, since the end of Prohibition, the Native American Maiden has graced selected packages of our Leinenkugel’s beers and was part of our company identification. The third generation of the Leinenkugel family paid tribute to the Native American people who first settled in and around Chippewa Falls where our founder, Jacob Leinenkugel, established the Spring Brewery in 1867. In fact, our beer in 1933 was not called Leinenkugel’s, it was called Chippewa’s Pride Beer.”
Even so, while the brewery’s decision to move away from such stereotypical label art is a positive (if long overdue) development, it was not universally celebrated. Indeed, the change provoked some complaints and an online petition to restore the label, with most of the signers appealing to tradition and arguing that the logo was artful and respectful. Even today, the lingering of such attitudes seems to betray an entitlement among non-Indigenous consumers to such depictions, and shows that the ideas that animated the Noble Savage myth are still present in some form today.
The logo’s retirement places the company—and the American brewing industry in general—in the middle of an overdue cultural shift. A few months prior, “Mia,” the woman depicted in the Land O’Lakes butter logo, was also retired. (The 1954 revision of the design was created by Patrick DesJarlait, an Ojibwe artist who was one of the first American Indian commercial artists.) The decision to drop the nickname of the Washington NFL team was made weeks before the Leinenkugel announcement. And just before the end of 2020, Cleveland’s American League baseball team announced the decision to change its name, after phasing out the Chief Wahoo cartoon mascot two years earlier.
Whether because of changes wrought by 20th-century Civil Rights movements, or increasing mainstream awareness of the country’s history of brutal oppression of Native people, or just because of crass commercial calculations, the use of Indian imagery to sell beer has all but disappeared. The Chief Oshkosh name was revived in the 1990s for a Red Lager made under contract for Mid-Coast Brewing using new artwork. However, an advertising campaign announcing an “Indian Uprising” to introduce the beer elicited numerous complaints. The brand only lasted for a few years.
The most notorious use of Indian imagery in this era was in the early 1990s, with Crazy Horse Malt Liquor. Hornell Brewing Company, a beer marketer based in New York, claimed it was honoring the leader who defeated Custer at Little Bighorn (known to the Lakota people as the Battle of Greasy Grass). However, many Native activists and South Dakota politicians perceived it otherwise. Vernon Bellecourt, a leader of the American Indian Movement declared “... this campaign targets Indian youth … we see this as a most insidious form of exploitation.”
“‘Native people have resented being cast into stereotypes. They are rejecting being placed into roles that serve to reaffirm the mainstream’s perception of their communities. As a result of new successes in diversifying their economies—especially through Indian gaming—many Native communities have now begun to regulate their own tourist enterprises and museums. This is a relatively new phenomenon, and it places the issues of image making squarely on their own shoulders.’”
South Dakota’s U.S. Representative at the time, Tim Johnson, agreed, arguing, “It is particularly repugnant to see the name of Crazy Horse identified with a product which has been the cause of untold suffering and pain for thousands of Native American families and individuals.” Legal action continued for about a decade, during which time several states acted to ban the product and Congress passed a law banning use of the name (later overturned). In 2001, John Stroh III, head of the company that actually manufactured the beer, made a formal apology to the Lakota and a peace offering to the descendants of Crazy Horse, though Hornell continued to use the name for several years.
And yet there are still exceptions. The Feather Falls Casino, owned by the Mooretown Rancheria of the Maidu Indians, has a brewery that features Naughty Native IPA and Wild Warrior APA among its labels. Even with Native ownership, the artwork for the brands seems designed to appeal to a white audience with traditional expectations of what an American Indian looks like. Coasters, label art and tap handles for Naughty Native show a woman with bare shoulders above an ample bosom, and the Wild Warrior has an arrow fitted to string and aimed toward the customer.
As Isleta Pueblo professor Theodore S. Jojola explained in “Moo Mesa: Some Thoughts on Stereotypes and Image Appropriation,” “At the same time, whether the dominant image is the warbonneted, face-painted, and buckskin-clad ‘chief’ or the erotic Indian princess, the irony is that many Native people continue to cater to such images. There is no consensus among Indian people—many Native communities are divided and factionalized over the exploitation of their own cultural images. Although attempts have been made by some tribes to regulate the use of sacred images and symbols, other tribes and individuals have made a profitable enterprise of playing the stereotyped Indian.”
The use of American Indian imagery in advertising was one manifestation of the white supremacy that has pervaded American thinking throughout the era of modern advertising. Berkhofer argued that popular culture was much more important in defining the common white conception of what an Indian was than elite culture—and advertising is an ever-present medium of popular culture. These depictions created a singular Indian for commercial consumption, ignoring both the dignity of individuals and significant differences among people and nations.
“The current wave of Indian images might seem benign—who would not want to be presented as perfect, beautiful, and all-knowing? But this benign image is deeply impersonal and distanced, once again ignoring Indian people as individuals and allowing real Indian people no subjectivity,” Bird cautions. There is reason to hope that the move away from the commercial appropriation of Native images and culture will continue.
“Native people have resented being cast into stereotypes,” says Jojola. “They are rejecting being placed into roles that serve to reaffirm the mainstream’s perception of their communities. As a result of new successes in diversifying their economies—especially through Indian gaming—many Native communities have now begun to regulate their own tourist enterprises and museums. This is a relatively new phenomenon, and it places the issues of image making squarely on their own shoulders.”
But there is also a role for allies of Indigenous communities. “Long gone are the days when the communication between brands and consumers was one way,” Maria Rodas, professor of marketing at the University of Southern California, recently observed. “Consumers have more power than ever, given the huge amount of information at their fingertips, how connected they all are and the easy access to social media platforms that help broadcast their messages.”
For nearly a century and a half, beer advertising has followed the trends of the day and created what Jojola called “generations of distortions that have been accepted as truths.” Perhaps the new generation of brewers and drinkers can lead the way into advertising that promotes their products without degrading the dignity of others.
Words by Doug HoversonIllustrations by Colette Holston
