Unless pretty much any hint of potentially alienated labor is off the table you can mostly resolve the tension by being willing to pay your graphic designer and do rights clearance before picking a flag (at least for official purposes one would hope that doing that would be mandatory; though the fact that the issue went to court suggests that the step was skipped here).
If you skip that(moral of the story, don’t skip that), though, you run out of moral high ground pretty fast: hard to make a pleasant argument for eminent domain for symbols; and objecting to the selling out because it’s to a non-aboriginal entity is edging awfully close to telling the artist that his own interests are forever subordinate to our perception of the interests of ‘his people’. Which gets into deeply awkward paternalistic racism territory real fast. It’s not fundamentally different from forbidding him from getting a job or going to college because his people’s cultural integrity depends on his continuation of traditional hunter-gathering practices; which wouldn’t really fly(one hopes).
