"Pickaninnies", meaning young Black children, was an American concept and term that had little or no Canadian usage. The Isaacs cigar factory in St. John seems to have made a regular practice of deploying American cigar names and labels for their own products—possibly because of the difficulty of obtaining original artwork locally or from central Canada. The labels on the majority of their brands in the Canadian Museum of Civilization collection—e.g., On Hand, Fairy Queen, Union Star—were executed by New York lithographers; one Canadian-produced label shows Buster Brown, an American popular cartoon figure.

Tobacco was introduced to the first Europeans in Canada by Aboriginal peoples, and was a currency of the fur trade: often a gift of tobacco opened negotiations between agents and trappers. Native people have been symbolically linked to tobacco in the commercial marketplace ever since.

As is evident in the depiction of other peoples on cigar box labels, manufacturers took little care to ensure that images of Native people were accurate or, for that matter, appropriate. This beautiful label was likely an off-the-rack product, bought from a salesman's catalogue, that provided space for the local brand title to be printed. The Ontario maker for some reason decided on "Mic-Mac," but either had little knowledge of the Eastern Woodlands tribe and what its traditional dwellings, environment, or clothing looked like, or didn't care. What the label depicts is decidedly un-Mic-Mac—except perhaps for the feather bonnet, which (by coincidence?) is reminiscent of the real thing.