The designer behind Newton's new city seal

For over a century, the Newton city seal depicted a meeting on a hill now in present-day Newton Corner. In it, puritan missionary John Eliot speaks to members of the Massachusett nation, some are seated childlike and cross-legged before him.

Back then, that hill was in a so-called praying town: places where early settlers forced local Indigenous communities to give up their traditions and convert to Christianity. For many, the seal was a racist depiction of colonization.

So back in 2020, the city began the process of reevaluating — and then redesigning — the seal. Earlier this year, Newton’s city council approved a new seal. It now shows City Hall with the City Hall Pond in the foreground.

The new seal was designed by local artist and designer Sebastian Ellington ‘Flying Eagle’ Ebarb. For years, he’s worked with organizations across the country on branding and signage. He’s also worked with cities like Boston and Natick to redesign their city seals — all while teaching design to the next generation of college students. For him, art is a way to impact the world around him.

“Everything is designed, [but] not always by a designer,” Ebarb said. “Every weapon of war ever made was designed by somebody — every bomb, every bullet. You get to choose what you get to work on in this life and what you want your work to be.”

Ebarb designs city seals through the design firm he co-founded called Nahi. They’ve designed for organizations across the country, with a focus on nonprofits, small businesses, government design and local political campaigns.

“I was raised with the idea that the community is more important than the individual,” Ebarb said.

Nahi means “we” in Apache. Ebarb is a member of Louisiana’s Choctaw-Apache tribe. He said part of Nahi’s mission is designing city and town seals to better reflect their history. Ebarb has worked on seals for Boston, Newton and Natick. He says the process can be difficult, especially if the redesign challenges the community's long-held beliefs.

“If you grew up with that information, and then you're challenged with ‘actually, it's not quite that way,’ it can be a little confusing,” Ebarb said.

Hattie Kerwin Derrick is Newton’s director of community engagement and inclusion. She worked with Ebarb while he redesigned her city’s seal. She said Ebarb really put his all into the project, from hand drawing all the designs to how he researched the city in order to start those designs. This included driving around Newton with city officials and his family to learn more about the city.

“That's kind of unheard of,” Derrick said. ”He could have easily just sat at a computer and did research, but he wanted to be involved in the community.”

Ebarb began working in what he calls “gov design” when he became the head designer for the city of Boston. He led the redesign of the Boston.gov website. He also helped the city create messaging during the pandemic and worked to redesign the digital process for obtaining birth and death certificates.

"My neighbors knew what I did and so when there were problems, they would literally come to me,” Ebarb said. “I could see the progression of my work in the community. And it was really empowering and really just very wholesome [to feel] like I was doing a service to the people around me.”

Designing for a city or town is more than just choosing the right fonts and matching colors, though that does play a role. Residents need to interact with their local government, whether that’s to report a pothole, apply for a marriage certificate, or pull a permit to renovate their house. Those interactions are inevitable, so “gov design” aims to make them easier to navigate and complete.

“Did people get what they needed?” Ebarb said. “Do they feel a little less frustrated and feel like there are people in City Hall working for them?”

He added: “How can we create something that makes the world better — to the extent that we can — and easier to use and bring voice and accessibility wherever we can.”

Ebarb’s heritage is important to him. His father is Indigenous. His mother was Black. Ebarb grew up in Brooklyn and says he didn’t feel physically connected to his nation because he grew up off the reservation. It played into already existing insecurities he had as a Black and Indigenous man.

”Fear of not feeling Native enough, not feeling Black enough, not feeling anything enough because I either wasn't connected or I had multiple identities in who I am in my multiracial makeup,” Ebarb said.

Because of that disconnect, he said he felt a lot of impostor syndrome when it came to his work in design.

“No matter what I create, because of my existence, I'm creating Indigenous design, I'm creating Indigenous art,” Ebarb said. “And now that I'm there, I fully own that and I can embrace it, but it took a long time for me to feel like, ‘Oh, am I allowed to do that?’ And it's like, ‘Why am I even asking permission?’”

Today, he says that connection has grown. He now helps run his tribe’s website and is the moderator of their Facebook group, which is a major way that tribal members, on and off the reservation, stay in touch. He’s also writing for and contributing illustrations to several children’s books, including one that examines connecting to your cultures when you don’t live where your community lives.

In his adulthood, he’s also making sure his two kids know their heritage.

“I've already talked to them about traditional hunting,” Ebarb said. “I've already talked to them about what it means to be Native American.”

He’s also working on a project with his tribe that will help them preserve their history. Ebarb says the hope is to build an online database just for tribal members that will include a log of tribal artifacts, history and knowledge to preserve those traditions for future generations.

“I think there's not a single Native American group that doesn't have a story about artifacts or knowledge or things like that getting ripped off and stolen either by academics or by convent or by other folks,” said Ebarb. “What we're trying to do is create a closed system so that only tribal members can get at the data.”