askchapo

I'll give you a real pet project: in Norway, a lot of road signs, manhole covers, government buildings and such depict municipal coats of arms. Almost every municipality in Norway has a coat of arms designed in the style and according to the principles of this guy, and I've always been very fond of these municipal coats of arms because they have this unified style yet they're all distinct from each other. The Norwegian municipal coats of arms are all simple, striking, timeless, memorable, and above all else meaningful. Sometimes those meanings are a bit of a cop-out like "oh our shield's got a wave because we're a coastal town" as if that's at all unique, but other times the symbolism is like "our shield depicts an ornament from the local thousand year old church" or "our shield depicts the Norse god that used to be venerated at a local temple here" or "our shield depicts a local traditional handicraft/industry that developed based on the particular challenges of local terrain" or something like that. Basically just bits of trivia that are genuinely distinctive and interesting and really emphasize how even the most unremarkable of rural podunk towns are areas that have been continuously inhabited for thousands of years.

…You don't really get that in Seppoland because the whole system there is built around making people forget about that whole "this land has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years" thing. On top of that the development of municipal symbolism in Seppoland has always been strongly impacted by the country's particular relationship to nationalism and white supremacy, which is why city flags in Seppoland tend to be some combination of bland, butt ugly, and neo-Confederate. But if we're basically doing a hard reset on the whole country… then I think it would be pretty poggers if Turtle Island municipal symbolism were done in the Norwegian style and filled with allusions to Indigenous history and present-day community unique to each location.

Now this plan would of course require a lot of dialog with the Indigenous communities represented to be done in an appropriate way, because I wouldn't want to impose a European cultural norm onto a colonized country and then decide for the colonized people how they should represent themselves; but if you do that dialog, then the result should be pretty nifty and leave everybody with a new perspective of and appreciation for their homes.