Three Flags: Appalachia, Western Armenia and The Iroquois Confederacy
An (occasionally reoccurring) feature on flags
Shout out to Flags That Go Hard over on Twitter1 for providing some much-needed inspiration for this post.2 If you’re one of the few who stayed on that increasingly conspiracy-addled platform and are looking for a good solid follow that doesn’t trip you down a rabbit hole where you find yourself covered in noxious bullshit that rots your brain, I can highly recommend them.
I’m having to dig deeper for these posts because I think if you add all the various platforms I’ve blogged on over the years, I must have looked at about every national flag out there and I don’t want to fall into the trap of recycling old posts and churning out thoughts on the same flag I’ve looked at multiple times over the years. One can only say so much about Le Tricoleur after all.
While some states have been making moves to upgrade their ‘Seals on Bedsheets’ (Utah’s new flag became official, and Minnesota’s official changeover is coming up soon) the process of changing a flag doesn’t move quickly enough to get good posts about genuinely new flags all the time.
So, I have to dig a little. Which is why it was so nice to find three flags that I had never seen before and looked interesting enough to write about.
First up, Appalachia:
True story: I did not know that Appalachia had a flag! I’m trying to think of any other distinct regions in America that have flags and all that I can come up with is New England and Cascadia, which you could argue might be a bit more geographically defined than culturally defined but I think it still works either way.
Outside of those two, things get a bit trickier. A Flag for the South will have you tap dancing through historical minefields. A Flag for the Midwest will get you into a thousand arguments about just what constitutes ‘the Midwest.’ I can’t think of any likelier candidates beyond those two.
The flag of Appalachia was finalized in 2023 and narrowed down from a list of six possible designs. This is their explanation for the colors flag:
-The green is representative of the lush forests that wrap around the ancient mountains and the rural setting of the region
-The navy blue is representative of the blue hue that colors the distant ridgelines that rest on the horizon while traveling through Appalachia.
-The gold is representative of the morning sun pouring out over the distant hills, indicative of a bright future for those who reside in these hills.
-The off-white of the quilt star motif is taken from the color of cloth, indicative of a blank canvas from which each Appalachian may draw their own colorful story
(If you want to learn more, head over to the Appalachian Flag Initiative for a more detailed explanation.)
Looking over the Flag March Madness, it didn’t seem like a lot of people were fans of this design- there were a lot of grumblings that it looked ‘too graphic design-y’ whatever that means, but I really like this flag. You can see what they were going for with the color scheme and I love that it makes you stop and think about the landscape and the region. You can see the blue hue of the distant ridgelines. You can see the sun pouring over the distant hills. You can see the green of the forests. It all just works really well.
Next up, Western Armenia:
My first thought was: “Man, that’s a cool looking flag” and my second thought was: “Where is Western Armenia?” and then my third thought when I looked that up was: “Oh.”
Western Armenia refers to the parts of the Armenian Highlands located within the current boundaries of the Republic of Turkey that make up the historical homeland of the Armenian people. That’s a pretty easy sentence to write and then you start looking into the history of it and realize that it’s a deceptive sentence because the history quite literally goes back thousands of years to the division of Western Armenia and Eastern Armenia between the Byzantine Empire and Sassanid Persia in AD 387.
But wait, it gets more complicated when you fast-forward to the 20th Century! There’s the Armenian Genocide. World War I. The Aftermath of World War— the Wiki-Page has a fascinating deep dive if you’re interested, but if I can boil this down to a paragraph or two. A good chunk of what is now northeastern Turkey was promised to the Armenians under the 1920 Treaty of Sevres— I think they make a good point in that so far, it’s the only international document defining the border between Turkey and Armenia but that’s the basis of their definition/claim of Western Armenia. Currently only one political party, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation claims the area— the Republic of Armenia does not.3
(It seems that public opinion wants all possible demands forwarded to Turkey, but Armenians appear to be pretty pragmatic about the notion of getting any territorial concessions.)
So where does the flag come from? Well, there is a National Council of Western Armenia that has organized in the diaspora. From what I can find, it’s either a separatist movement that wants to claim the areas promised to Armenia under the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 or it’s ‘an organizing committee of the Congress of heirs of Western Armenians who survived the Armenian genocide, active in diaspora communities.’
Unfortunately, I cannot find a lot of useful information about the flag itself.
There is an Armenian Wheel of Eternity at the center of the flag. The Christian cross makes up the backdrop and I can’t find anything about the colors. Either way, the symbol at the center makes this flag stand out.
Finally, the Iroquois Confederacy:
This caught my eye because you don’t see a lot of purple flags out there and it just looked cool. The origins of the flag are traced back to the 1980s, when the Iroquois men’s national lacrosse team needed a flag to represent the Haudenosaunee as an independent entity for a competition. Wikipedia credits Rick Hill a Tuscarora artist, writer, and educator associated with the lacrosse team working with Mohawk father-son duo Harold and Tim Johnson to create the design. The lacrosse team accepted the design and later it was adopted for the Haudenosaunee.
(Controversies about lacrosse and the Haudenosaunee do pop up from time to time and I think the last one I can remember seeing was about passports to me it’s very simple: whether you consider them the originators of the game or that it was given to them by the Creator, they should be allowed to compete under their flag and honestly, the State Department should be able to issue them passports as well.)
The design of the flag is based on the Hiawatha Belt, which is a simple that dates back to the original uniting of the five tribes and was used as a symbol of unity between them for hundreds of years before its adaptation for use as a flag. Purple is the ‘color of the Iroquois’, derived from the mollusk shells used in making the wampum.
The four squares and one tree represent the original five nations of the Haudenosaunee. From left to right, they are the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga (the tree), Oneida, and Mohawk. The placement mirrors their geographic placement and the the Tree, which is an eastern white pine stands for the Tree of Peace within the Onondaga nation, where the five nations united.
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That’s all I’ve got for this installment of Three Flags. If you like it, let me know in the comments and if you too, have someone who loves flags in your life, send them this post and tell ‘em to subscribe! I’m always looking for more readers.
Yes, it’s always going to be Twitter to me. I refuse to call it ‘X’ because it’s a stupid name and mainly just on general principle. Don’t at me, bro.
Specifically, it’s their annual March Madness Tournament where they do a 64 flag bracket to decide which flag reigns supreme. Though why they don’t call it MARCH FLAGNESS is beyond me.
The Republic of Armenia has bigger geopolitical problems at the moment, as it’s being squeezed between Turkey and Azerbaijan in really uncomfortable ways.