SEAL STRIFE CONTINUES IN THE CITY OF PEACE (SPRING 2026)

 

As reported in the Autumn 2025 issue of The Conant Courier, a task force set up by Salem City Council decided by a majority vote to change the city seal. The background to this decision was that several members of the Salem community complained that the seal, depicting the Sumatran man seen here, was insulting to Asian-Americans. 

 Various members of the task force such as Dakota Russell, Executive Director of Salem’s House of the Seven Gables, shared this view. He stated that prior to moving to Salem, he had been involved in a museum on a site where over 14,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly incarcerated during World War Two. 

‘There I came to understand keenly how depictions of Asians and Asian Americans in popular media helped pave the way for discrimination, violence, and mass human rights violations,’ he explained. ‘I believe there is an opportunity here to correct some of that past injustice, while also creating a symbol that honors Salem’s unique and storied history.’ 

 

Many other Salem residents such as Benjamin Shallop, pictured above, view the seal similarly. ‘I'm strongly in favor of changing it,’ wrote the author of The Founding of Salem: City of Peace, pointing out that Massachusetts has a huge east Asian population. ‘Salem is a living historic city, and our own generation should have the right and the ability to make our own mark on it,’ he believes. ‘And the city seal DOES resemble the awful caricatures that have been used to mock people of Asian descent here over the years. 

I don't think that was the intent at the time it was created, but that doesn't really matter when caricatures which resemble that always accompany the periodic waves of hate crimes against Asian Americans, including the recent one that followed the Covid 19 Pandemic.’ 

The seal’s creation goes back some 186 years. Dr Donna Seger, of the Department of History at Salem State University, explained that the seal features a depiction of a native of the Aceh province of Sumatra. 

Also depicted is a pepper plant, and an arriving ship, all of which represent the lucrative and impactful pepper trade which dominated Salem's economy and society and culture in the first part of the nineteenth century and left a lasting imprint. The seal was adopted in 1839, and its central image was redesigned by Salem artist Ross Turner in the 1880s to represent a more general Asian figure, with the ship and pepper plant remaining.

Dr Seger is one of many Salem residents who strongly oppose any change to the seal. ‘Salem can’t lose Sumatra,’ she wrote on 23 September 2025 on her Streets of Salem blog. She imagines that the Sumatran figure could represent a local dignitary, Po Adam, a friend of the wealthiest Salem pepper trader Joseph Peabody, whose son George designed the seal. 

One member of the Salem City Seal Task Force is historian Professor Michael Feener, pictured left, of Kyoto University Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Born in Salem he has always been fascinated by the city’s history of maritime trade, and worked for a time at both the Salem Maritime National Historic Site and at the Peabody Museum. ‘In all my years overseas I have continued to proudly represent the history of Salem to a widely diverse range of inter locutors around the world,’ he writes.  

A talk at Salem’s Hamilton Hall on 12 March, entitled ‘Sumatra’s Maritime History: Before and After the Salem Pepper Trade’ is being given by Professor Feener. Tickets are free but reservations are required. 

Professor Feener points out that most of his friends and colleagues in Aceh province were surprised by the fact that the image was being perceived by some people in Salem as being disrespectful, exoticizing, or ‘othering’. 

 ‘As an Acehnese,’ wrote Professor Reza Idria, of Indonesia’s Ar-Raniry State Islamic University in Banda Aceh, ‘seeing the Salem city seal for the first time in 2014 was a moment of pride’. 

Perhaps time will solve this vexed issue. ‘We should have the right and the ability to make changes to our city that reflect us and who we are just as our ancestors always have,’ writes Benjamin Shallop. ‘Personally I would like a sail and a windmill to highlight our historic and future ties to the sea, but whatever we decide I sincerely hope that future generations will be comfortable with changing it again and again.’