Category : News by T-Pole | 30 May 2013
Are you wondering why TPole is so called and why our logo is characterized by a totem surrounded by a circle?
Here is what the founder of TPole told us about the origins of the company logo.
“It was 1995, one of those evenings you spend with friends and miss even if many years have gone by…
That night we were discussing plans for the future. When I started talking about the idea of opening my own company, we immediately began to wonder how to call it. I had recently read a book called “Black Elk Speaks” that had affected me a lot, I don’t know if because my wife recommended it to me or for any other reason.”
Black Elk Speaks: the book that inspired TPole
This book is about a series of conversations that the writer John Gneisenau Neihardt had with Nicholas Black Elk (1866-1950), a Sioux better known as Black Elk. Black Elk was one of those uncommon representatives of the Indian subdued community that accepted to represent the image of the new America with the Wild West Show. A show with a great folkloristic impact, organized by the famous Buffalo Bill and represented in almost all the United States and in many European countries.
At the end of what we could call a real international tour, Black Elk went back to Pine Ridge’s reservation where his tribe lay. The following year he was one of the 19th survivors of the Wounded Knee massacre by which the “white people” would have liked to settle the Indian problem definitively.
Most of the public opinion’s protests after the massacre of Wounded Knee convinced the US government to stop violence against the survivors.
Where does the idea of the logo with the circle surrounding the totem come from?
The image of Black Elk that the pages of the book betray is neither the one of a barbarian nor of a savage, but the one of a man who had preserved all his ancient pride, even if he had agreed to integrate in the new America.
Plot apart, what affected me the most were some of Black Elk’s words and thought.
I remember by hearth he said he had understood that Indian civilization had ended when his people had been obliged to move and live in grey squared houses. He said that it was incomprehensible for him because for men’s people it is important to live in harmony with universe. Planets are round, birds’ nests are rounded, and indians’ tents have a circular shape and are in circle respecting the harmony of universe, of what is natural. Square does not exist in the nature of things.
The idea of the circle surrounding a totem (our logo) was born exactly from these words, in order to symbolize the sense of protection and harmony which is at the base of everything and that we can also find in the symbols of many other cultures.
After establishing how to represent it graphically, I was looking for a name which could join together these values and the idea of technology (that is what we deal in)
So our name was the result of the discussions that followed my story and my wife’s inspiration: TPole (“TPole” as Totem Pole: Totem tree or as Technology Pole!)”
