Louisiana's flag depicts a mother pelican tearing open her own breast to feed her three chicks on her blood, above a ribbon reading "Union Justice Confidence." It is comfortably the most gothic image on any American state flag, a piece of medieval Christian iconography adopted by a French-Catholic state and kept, with interruptions, for more than two centuries. The interruptions are the good part of the story. For most of the twentieth century the pelican on the flag did not actually bleed, and it took an observant teenager from Houma to make the state put the blood back.
The pelican in her piety
Medieval bestiaries taught that in time of famine a mother pelican would strike her own breast with her beak and revive or nourish her young with her blood. The image, known in heraldry as the pelican in her piety ("vulning herself," in the jargon, from the Latin for wounding), became a standard emblem of Christ's sacrifice and of the Eucharist, carved on altars and church lecterns across Europe. Naturalists eventually spoiled the biology, but the emblem survived.
Louisiana, home to enormous colonies of brown pelicans and to a deeply Catholic settler culture, took the emblem early. A territorial seal showing a pelican feeding her young was in use by 1804, the year after the Louisiana Purchase, and the choice is traditionally credited to William C.C. Claiborne, the territory's first American governor. The pelican stuck through statehood in 1812 and every reorganization since. Nineteenth-century versions of the seal generally showed the blood: three drops falling from the mother's breast.
A flag without a law, then a law without details
Through the nineteenth century, pelican flags represented Louisiana without any statute behind them. Militia units carried them, and when the state seceded from the Union in January 1861 pelican flags flew over New Orleans alongside the new national flag the state adopted that February: thirteen blue, white, and red stripes with a lone pale yellow star on a red canton, a design saluting the original thirteen states and the French and Spanish colors in the state's past. The Confederate period ended that experiment, but the pelican kept flying.
The legislature finally made it official on July 1, 1912, in the centennial year of statehood: a blue field, the pelican and her nest in white, and a white ribbon carrying the motto "Union Justice Confidence." The 1912 act specified little else. It did not fix the number of chicks, the drawing of the bird, or the blood. Flag makers improvised, and over the following decades the gorier details faded. Most twentieth-century Louisiana flags showed a placid white pelican, no wound, no drops, sometimes with anywhere from two to four chicks in the nest. The state was flying a censored version of its own emblem and nobody in authority seemed to notice.
A student's catch
The person who noticed was Joseph Louviere, an eighth-grader at Vandebilt Catholic High School in Houma. Working on a school project about the state flag, he compared the modern flag with historical versions of the seal and saw that the three drops of blood, present in the nineteenth century, had vanished. He took the finding to his state representative, Damon Baldone of Houma.
The legislature agreed with the fourteen-year-old. House Bill 833 of the 2006 session, which became Act 92, requires that the pelican on both the state flag and the state seal be shown "tearing its breast to feed its young" with "an appropriate display of three drops of blood." The bill passed in the spring of 2006 and the governor signed it that May. Louisiana had legislated its flag back into bleeding.
The 2010 flag
The 2006 act fixed the blood but not the bird, and Louisiana flags still varied from maker to maker. The state closed the loop in 2010 with a fully standardized design, unveiled on November 22, 2010. The new pelican was drawn by Curtis Vann Jr., and it is a more naturalistic bird than its predecessors: the head carries the yellow-brown crown of a real brown pelican, the state bird, while the body stays heraldic white. Three chicks sit in the nest, three red drops fall from the breast, and the motto ribbon and lettering are drawn to a single specification.
The brown pelican itself gives the emblem a second layer of near-loss and recovery. Pesticides wiped the species out in Louisiana by the mid-1960s, an awkward situation for a state nicknamed the Pelican State, and birds reintroduced from Florida rebuilt the population over the following decades. The species came off the federal endangered list in 2009, the year before the standardized flag appeared.
How it ranks
In the North American Vexillological Association's 2001 survey of 72 state, territorial, and provincial flags, Louisiana placed 36th with a score of 4.98 out of 10, mid-table: docked for lettering and detail, credited for having an emblem nobody confuses with any other state's. The survey predates the 2010 redesign. Whatever designers make of the composition, the flag now says exactly what the state intends it to say, down to a drop count written into law. Three, per Act 92 of 2006.
References
[1] Wikipedia, "Flag of Louisiana." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Louisiana
[2] 64 Parishes (Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities), "Louisiana State Flag." https://64parishes.org/entry/louisiana-state-flag
[3] The Times-Picayune / NOLA.com, "New Louisiana state flag with bleeding pelican is unfurled" (2010). https://www.nola.com/news/politics/new-louisiana-state-flag-with-bleeding-pelican-is-unfurled/article_43a6ff1d-fbe6-5cde-8fc6-e3f84b4a2ec4.html
[4] LSU Reveille, "Louisiana adds blood drops to state flag" (2006). https://lsureveille.com/180893/uncategorized/louisiana-adds-blood-drops-to-state-flag/
[5] Louisiana Secretary of State, "State Symbols" student information packet. https://www.sos.la.gov/historicalresources/publisheddocuments/studentpacketbooklet.pdf
[6] North American Vexillological Association, "2001 State/Provincial Flag Survey." https://nava.org/digital-library/design/surveys/2001-State-Provincial-Flag-Survey.pdf