AKAlaska State Symbols

Alaska's most recognizable symbol is its flag, and a 13-year-old designed it. In 1927 the American Legion ran a territorial contest for schoolchildren, and the winning entry came from Benny Benson, an Alutiiq boy from Chignik who was living at the Jesse Lee Home in Seward. He submitted eight gold stars on a field of blue with a short note explaining each part: blue for the Alaska sky and the forget-me-not, the Big Dipper for the Great Bear and for strength, and the North Star for the future state of Alaska, the most northerly in the Union. Alaska waited another 32 years for statehood, but it kept the boy's flag.

Official state symbols

The forget-me-not is the oldest of these, adopted by the territorial legislature in 1917 at the urging of the Grand Igloo of the Pioneers of Alaska. The motto is the newest of the core set: "North to the Future" was coined by Juneau newsman Richard Peter and picked from a contest for the 1967 centennial of the Alaska Purchase.

What is on the Alaska state flag

Eight gold stars on a field of deep blue, and nothing else. Seven of them form the Big Dipper in the upper left, and the eighth, larger and set apart in the upper right corner, is Polaris, the North Star. The Dipper points to Polaris in the real sky, so the flag is a working star chart as well as an emblem. Blue stands for the sky and for the forget-me-not; gold stands for the metal that brought most non-Native newcomers north in the first place.

The territorial legislature adopted Benson's design on May 2, 1927. He received a $1,000 scholarship and an engraved gold watch. The flag became the state flag at statehood in 1959. Marie Drake had already written a poem about it that ran in a school bulletin, and once Elinor Dusenbury set the words to music the result, "Alaska's Flag," was adopted as the state song in 1955.

The Alaska state seal

The seal dates to 1910, when Alaska was still a district rather than a territory, and it is essentially an inventory of the economy the federal government hoped for. Rays across the top represent the northern lights. Below them sit a range of mountains, and in front of those a smelter, a railway train, and ships under sail on open water. The foreground holds a farmer walking behind a horse and plow with three shocks of wheat beside him. Fish and seals swim in the water at the base, standing for the fisheries and the fur trade.

Read together, the elements name mining, transport, agriculture and the sea as the four pillars of the territory. Agriculture never scaled the way the designers imagined, but the plow is still on the seal.

Symbols that surprise people

• The official state sport is dog mushing. The legislature named it in 1972, a year before the first Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race ran to Nome.
• Gold is not the state gem. Jade is, adopted in 1968 alongside gold as the state mineral. Alaska has jade deposits in the Kobuk River region, including a whole mountain of it.
• Schoolchildren picked the state insect. The four-spotted skimmer dragonfly won a statewide vote in 1995, partly because its hovering flight reminded students of the bush aircraft Alaskans depend on.
• The state dog came from a classroom bill. Students at Polaris K-12 School in Anchorage pushed the Alaskan malamute through the legislature in 2010.
• The state fossil is still turning up. Woolly mammoth remains, named the state fossil in 1986, keep eroding out of thawing permafrost and river cutbanks across the Interior.

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