The Emblem Was Never Just an Emblem.

In 2017, this corporation was one year old and had no logo. We had a board, a vision, four founding initiatives, and no money to spend on branding. So one day, as Chairman of the Board, I did what builders do when something is missing: I built it.

I am not an artist the way so many of our people are artists — the painters, the beadworkers, the carvers whose hands hold generations of skill. My art is different. I am an artist of architecture — an artist of manifesting a development. So I took one of those big two-by-three sticky notepads, the kind you peel off and slap on a wall in a planning meeting, and I started drawing what was in my mind.

What came out was not a logo. It was a town.

Four sections, shaped like eagle feathers, radiating from a center. A traffic roundabout where they meet. Roads running through the whole of it, and a highway circling the outside — the ring around what I labeled, simply, the “New Community.” And inside each feather, block by block, a purpose. One feather for commercial development. One for industrial development — the jobs that make everything else possible. One for the corporation’s own office, standing among housing development, youth build programs, and mentorship space. One for food sovereignty — distribution, a food market, and processing. And in the green between the feathers: farms, crops, and gardens, feeding the whole circle.

At the very center of the drawing, where every road leads, I placed the heart of it: a cultural center. A museum. A visitors’ area and powwow grounds. The place everything else exists to protect.

I knew even then the order it would have to be built in. Industry and commerce first, so our people would have work. Then homes, so the workforce could stay. Then everything else, because now there would be a community to hold it. That sticky-note drawing was a capital strategy disguised as a picture.

Then I took my rough draft to a local artist — one of our own, whose hands could do what mine could not. And what came back still moves me.

The artist translated the plan into our own visual language. The four feather-sections became four eagle feathers. The compass of the plan became a medicine wheel woven in porcupine quills — the black quills facing the West, the red facing the North where the Buffalo Nation stands, the yellow facing the East of the new day, the white facing the South of the ancestors. The roads I had drawn became lines of yellow dots, running from every direction toward the center. And at the center, where I had placed the cultural heart of the community, the artist placed the turtle — because when all the roads lead home, home is the back of the turtle. Our own center of our own Turtle Island.

Look at our original seal now and you will see it: the highway ring. The four development sections. The roads. The gardens in the green. The center where the people gather. Every element of that emblem is a line item in a community master plan. It always was.

We scouted the land. We mapped the plan onto real acreage near Cannon Ball, along Highway 1806 — hundreds of acres where the New Community could stand. We commissioned the first architectural rendering of the cultural center that would anchor its middle. The drawing kept becoming more real.

And now, a decade on, watch what the emblem is doing: the housing feather is rising as the 108-home master plan at Dream Hills in Cannon Ball. The commercial feather stands in Fort Yates as the WITĖ Northwest Building, with the WITĖ Southeast Building planned beside it. The food sovereignty feather feeds more than three hundred families a season from our gardens. The youth spaces are full every summer. And the center of the wheel — the cultural heart every road was drawn to reach — is taking form as the Aháŋni Historical Society.

When our name became Seven Stones Corp in 2026, the turtle carried over from that first seal into the shape of our new mark — the shape stayed, and the prayer-way sevens gave the name its meaning. But the original emblem remains what it has always been: not a logo we outgrew, but a promise we are still keeping — drawn on a sticky notepad by a chairman who could not draw, finished by an artist who could, and built, piece by piece, by all of us ever since.

We are not designing a brand. We are constructing a drawing.