Minnesota officially replaced its state flag on May 11, 2024, but for a widening swath of communities across the state, the new banner has never gone up — and may never.
Cities and counties, including Detroit Lakes, Wadena, Crow Wing County, Zumbrota, Elk River, Champlin, Byron, Houston County, Pine Island, St. Francis, North Branch and Williams, have all chosen to keep or return to the old flag design rather than raise the new one. The list has continued to grow into 2026.
The push for a new flag had been building for decades. The old flag’s seal depicted a farmer plowing his field with a Native American riding on horseback toward a setting sun, an image that many, particularly Indigenous communities, viewed as a representation of forced displacement. The central image, depicting a pioneer with a rifle, a farmer and a Native American on horseback with a spear, had been routinely accused of glorifying westward expansion and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which critics say justified the genocide and erasure of Indigenous populations across the American West. The old flag was also reportedly repeatedly mocked by vexillologists (flag design experts) as one of the least recognizable in the country.
The movement to change Minnesota’s flag formally began on March 22, 2022, when legislators Mike Freiberg and Peter Fischer introduced a bill to update the state flag and seal. The selection process did not begin in earnest until May 2023, when the State Emblems Redesign Commission was created. The commission first met in September and opened submissions to the public in October. More than 2,000 entries were submitted and reviewed in November, with six finalists chosen and eventually narrowed to three.
The commission voted 11 to 1 in favor of a submission by Andrew Prekker, a 24-year-old from Luverne, a small city in southwestern Minnesota. Prekker had no formal design background. He said he studied vexillology research, polled flag enthusiasts online and researched Minnesota history before arriving at his design.
The commission made two key modifications to Prekker’s original entry: rotating the star by 22.5 degrees, so it pointed straight north and replacing the original light blue, white and green stripes with a solid light blue field. The final design features a dark navy shape representing Minnesota’s geographic boundaries with an eight-pointed white North Star at its center and a solid light blue field representing the state’s lakes and waterways.
“It is my greatest hope that this new flag can finally represent our state and all its people properly,” Prekker said in a statement after his design was selected, so that every Minnesotan of every background, including Indigenous communities and tribal nations who have been historically excluded, can look up at the flag with pride.
The new flag was formally adopted on May 11, 2024, Minnesota Statehood Day. The energy around the redesign was palpable, and the new banner even made its way into space courtesy of the Ilic Group.
The backlash, however, has been substantial. Residents opposing the design have raised several concerns: they felt left out of the process, the flag looks too similar to Somalia’s flag and they are resistant to such a major symbolic change.
Conservative critics argued that the new flag resembled the flag of Somalia or the flag of Puntland. State officials responded that any resemblance was coincidental, noting the specific meaning of the star and colors in the Minnesota context. Secretary of State Steve Simon pointed out that several U.S. state flags share color schemes with foreign flags, citing Iowa and France or Texas and Chile as examples.
Some criticism circulated by conservatives has been inaccurate. The flag does not resemble that of Somalia or its Puntland region. While the original design and the Puntland flag did include light blue, white and green stripes in the same order, the commission dropped those stripes in favor of simplicity and symmetry. And it is a stretch to say the final version bears much resemblance to the Somali national flag, which is a solid light blue with a white, five-pointed star at its center.
Ted Kaye, secretary of the North American Vexillological Association, who helped train Minnesota’s State Emblems Redesign Commission, pushed back sharply on the Somalia comparisons. “Minnesota is the land of sky-blue waters. Two-thirds of the flag is sky-blue waters. It’s the North Star State, it’s the star of the north,” Kaye said. “There are only so many colors you can choose for flags, and you’re going to choose colors that others have chosen as well. That doesn’t mean there’s any connection.”
Republican officials described the redesign effort as an attempt to erase the past, while DFL proponents justified it as an open and community-driven process. In early 2024, Republican legislators introduced bills seeking to place the new flag on a statewide ballot, but those efforts stalled.
As of April 2026, the redesign remains one of the most talked-about state symbol changes in recent American history, with communities divided over whether to embrace the new banner or hold onto the old one
Rebellious boomers on bookface, that like to post mean things about people from Somalia. They’ll all be dead in a few years and the old flag will be almost as well remembered as Canada’s former flag.