The flag of Massachusetts is a white flag carrying the Commonwealth's coat of arms: a gold Native American figure on a blue shield, a silver star, a Latin motto about seeking peace by the sword, and, above all of it, an arm holding that sword. It was adopted in 1908, drawn in the 1890s, and assembled from elements as old as the 1629 colony seal. It is also, at this writing, a flag with an expiration question hanging over it. Massachusetts has spent the 2020s running commissions on whether and how to replace the seal, the flag, and the motto, and the process has produced finalists but not yet a flag.
What is on the flag
The field is white, the proportions unfixed by statute. Centered on it is the shield: blue, bearing an Algonquian figure in gold, dressed in shirt, leggings, and moccasins, holding a bow in his right hand and an arrow in his left. The arrow points downward, a convention read as peaceful intent. A five-pointed white star sits at the figure's shoulder, marking Massachusetts as one of the original thirteen states. Around the shield runs a blue ribbon lettered in gold: "Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem," adapted from a line attributed to the English republican writer Algernon Sidney, and usually translated "By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty."
The crest above the shield is the detail most visitors notice last and most critics notice first: a bent arm, sleeved and gold, grasping a broadsword, blade up. Heraldically it illustrates the motto's first clause. Positioned over the head of the figure below, it has struck the seal's critics, tribal members among them, as illustrating something else.
From colony seals to 1908
Native figures have marked Massachusetts seals from the beginning. The 1629 seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony showed a Native man saying "Come over and help us," a piece of missionary self-justification lifted from the Book of Acts. The Commonwealth's seal of 1780 established the modern arrangement of shield, star, crest, and motto. Through the nineteenth century the artwork drifted from engraver to engraver until the 1890s, when the state hired illustrator Edmund H. Garrett to produce a definitive version. Garrett needed a model and used a photograph of Thomas Little Shell, an Ojibwe chief from the northern Plains, roughly two thousand miles from Massachusetts. His drawing was adopted around 1900 and is essentially what flies today.
The flag itself came later than the seal. The General Court made the state flag official on March 18, 1908, putting the arms on a white field. For its first six decades the flag was two-faced: the arms on the front, and on the reverse a blue shield with a green pine tree, the old emblem of New England that had flown over Bunker Hill era militias. Double-sided flags are expensive to make and the arrangement was abolished in 1971, when the legislature put the arms on both sides. The pine tree kept its job on the Commonwealth's separate naval and maritime flag; Massachusetts and Maine are the only states that maintain one.
The long argument over the seal
Objections to the seal are not new. Massachusetts tribes, including the Wampanoag communities whose ancestors met the Mayflower, have pointed out for generations that the state's emblem is a Native man drawn by a white illustrator from a photograph of a chief from another nation, standing under a colonist's sword. The sword itself is said to be modeled on a broadsword owned by Myles Standish, the Plymouth Colony's military commander, whose record includes the 1623 killing of Massachusett men at Wessagusset. Legislation to change the seal was filed repeatedly from the 1980s onward, for years without result.
Movement came in January 2021, when Governor Charlie Baker signed a resolve creating a special commission on the seal and motto, with tribal representation among its members. The commission concluded in 2023 having agreed that the seal and motto should change, but without producing a replacement, a result that satisfied nearly no one. In July 2024 Governor Maura Healey signed a budget provision creating a successor, the Seal, Flag, and Motto Advisory Commission, with a mandate to run an actual design process.
That process has been concrete. A public call in May and June 2025 drew 1,165 submissions; reviewers cut the field to 48 semifinalists and then, on August 28, 2025, to three finalists in each category. The flag finalists: a circle of turkey feathers on a crimson field, a mayflower on a blue field, and a wave-and-star design named for the Great Blue Hill. Public hearings across the state followed in fall 2025, a design firm was engaged to refine the concepts, and further rounds of design work continued into 2026. The commission's final recommendation goes to the governor; the legislature would still have to act. As of mid-2026 the 1908 flag remains the flag.
A flag in the middle of the pack
Whatever replaces it will have a low aesthetic bar to clear, by the standards flag scholars apply. The 2001 North American Vexillological Association survey ranked Massachusetts 38th of 72, with a score of 4.78: better than the seal-on-blue crowd, thanks to the white field, but marked down for fine detail and Latin no one can read at distance. The finalists of 2025 all follow the current fashion for simple geometry and symbolic color.
The stakes, though, were never really graphic design. The debate is about whether a state whose name comes from the Massachusett people should keep an emblem of them drawn by others, under a sword. However the commission's work ends, Massachusetts will have spent more sustained official attention on that question than any state has ever given its flag.
References
[1] Wikipedia, "Flag of Massachusetts." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Massachusetts
[2] Massachusetts Seal, Flag, and Motto Advisory Commission, official page. https://www.mass.gov/orgs/massachusetts-seal-flag-and-motto-advisory-commission
[3] Commonwealth of Massachusetts, "Massachusetts Seal, Flag, and Motto Advisory Commission Announces Top Selections" (2025). https://www.mass.gov/news/massachusetts-seal-flag-and-motto-advisory-commission-announces-top-selections
[4] Boston.com, "Massachusetts unveils finalists for state flag, motto, and seal" (September 2025). https://www.boston.com/community/tell-us/2025/09/09/massachusetts-state-flag-motto-and-seal/
[5] North American Vexillological Association, "2001 State/Provincial Flag Survey." https://nava.org/digital-library/design/surveys/2001-State-Provincial-Flag-Survey.pdf