MNMinnesota State Symbols

The common loon is the symbol Minnesota is known by, and the state earned it: Minnesota holds more common loons than any other state outside Alaska, roughly 12,000 birds spread across its lakes. The legislature made it the state bird in 1961. The loon now carries even more weight than it used to, because in 2024 it became the central figure on a brand new state seal, part of the biggest overhaul of Minnesota's emblems since statehood.

Official state symbols

What is on the Minnesota state flag

Minnesota flies a different flag than it did two years ago. Since 11 May 2024, Statehood Day, the official design has been a dark blue panel on the hoist side shaped roughly like the state itself, sometimes described as a K shape, carrying a white eight-pointed star. The rest of the flag is a lighter blue field. The star is a direct reference to the motto, "L'Étoile du Nord," and the pale blue stands for the state's water. There is no lettering, no seal and no date on it, which was the point.

The flag it replaced was a royal blue field with the old state seal printed in the middle, a design in that form since 1957 and traceable to 1893. Vexillologists routinely ranked it among the worst state flags in the country because it was unreadable at distance and near identical to a dozen other seal-on-blue flags. A State Emblems Redesign Commission picked the new design in December 2023 from more than 2,100 public submissions, and it took effect automatically when the legislature let the deadline pass.

The new state seal

The same commission replaced the seal. The old one showed a white farmer plowing a field while a Native American man rode away over the horizon, an image Dakota and Ojibwe leaders had objected to for generations as a picture of displacement. The seal adopted in 2024 puts a common loon on water in the foreground, with wild rice, pine trees and a rising north star behind it. Around the rim it carries the French motto and the words "Mni Sóta Makoce," the Dakota phrase meaning the land where the waters reflect the clouds, from which the state's name comes.

Symbols that surprise people

• An official state photograph. Minnesota named "Grace," Eric Enstrom's 1918 photo of an old man bowed over bread and soup, taken in Bovey, as state photograph in 2002.
• A state mushroom. The morel was designated in 1984, and Minnesota was the first state to name one.
• A state fruit bred in a lab. The Honeycrisp apple, made the state fruit in 2006, was developed by the University of Minnesota and released in 1991.
• An endangered state bee. The rusty patched bumble bee, adopted in 2019, was the first bumble bee placed on the federal endangered species list in the continental United States.
• The only French motto. "L'Étoile du Nord" was chosen by Governor Henry Sibley in 1861 as a nod to the French voyageurs who mapped the fur routes, and no other state motto is in French.

Symbols of bordering states

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