Tattoo Traditions of Native North America

TATTOO OF NATIVE

TRADITIONS NORTH AMERICA Ancient and Contemporary Expressions of Identity

Lars Krutak

LM Publishers

To Heidi, Neena, and Xika with Love

CONTENTS Preface and acknowledgements Introduction

Artic and Subartic

Northwest Coast and Plateau

7 13 An Etymological Comment on Culture Groups and Indigenous Peoples Tattoo Traditions of Native North America

16 17

19 Faces from the Past One Stitch or Poke at a Time Amuletic Tattoos, Honor Markings, and Sympathetic Magic Concepts of Therapeutic Tattooing Revitalization Efforts

21 29 35 46 55

65 Cultural Contexts of Northwest Coast Tattooing The Moiety and Clan House Crest Objects The Potlatch and Tattooing Practices Sacred Symbols of the Supernatural Guardians of the Plateau Supernatural Communications Guardian Tattoos The ’Nlaka’pamux Tattoo Revival The Northwest Coast Tattoo Revival

California, Great Basin, and American Southwest 113 Out West: A Tribal Geography of Tattooing The “Roasting” of Girls Magical, Medicinal, and Miscellaneous Marks Revitalization Movements – Tattooing tools and substances used in the Native American West Great Plains 147 Tattooing Bundles of the Great Plains – Omaha Men’s Tattooing – Flesh Offerings – Indian Agents, Missionaries, and Tattoos The Price of Honor The Chosen Few, Men’s Tattooing Motifs, and Cosmological Implications – Red Cloud’s Vision Quest Women’s Marks of Honor and Sacred Skins Vanishing Traditions Eastern Woodlands 181 The Warrior’s Path – The “Red Road” and Thunderbird Dreaming War Birds War Clubs and Ornamented Trees Totems, Marked Graves, and Warrior Tattoos Tattooed “Bodyes” of Evidence – Painted Hides, Thunderbirds, and Tattoos – Therapeutic Tattoos of the Great Lakes Marking the Past and Future Notes Literature Index About the author

218 238 251 256

66 68 71 78 89 91 94 95 99 105 115 126 133 137 144 153 156 162 164 164 166 172 175 178 182 184 186 188 192 201 202 206 214

1 | Daisy Okinello (Epeqaaq), a tattooed St. Lawrence Island Yupik woman, ca. 1925. Collection of the author.

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

2 | Káh-kée-tsee, a Wichita woman, 1834. Art by George Catlin.

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The Indigenous peoples of North America have produced astonishingly rich and diverse forms of tattooing for thousands of years. Long neglected by anthropologists and art historians, tattooing was a time-honored traditional practice that expressed the patterns of tribal social organization and religion, while also channeling worlds inhabited by deities, spirits, and the ancestors.

But tattoos also inscribed affiliation, personhood, and cultural pride by communicating shared group values on the skin for all to see. As a system of knowledge transmission tattooing provided a visual definition of what the Native world was and how it was constituted through personal and collective experience. That is because tattoos were carried through life and onwards into death as Indigenous markers of identity, belief, and being that could never be taken away.

Tattoo Traditions of Native North America explores the many facets of indelible Indigenous

body marking across every cultural region of North America. As the first book on the subject, it breaks new ground on one of the least-known mediums of Amerindian expressive culture that nearly disappeared from view in the twentieth century, until it was reborn in recent decades.

This book is the result of many voices and life experiences that have been, and continue to be, inextricably bound to the cultures that gave rise to them. Although each of these Native societies had their own beliefs, motivations, and ritual mandates for body marking, certain parallels and recurring themes become readily apparent.

Considering the vast expanse of Native North America this may seem surprising, but Indigenous peoples living here were somewhat unified by a set of core values encompassing notions of tradition and interactions and responsibility to the natural world, supernatural realm, and the cosmos itself.

More specifically, daily life revolved around increasing one’s awareness of the balance between humanity, nature, and the metaphysical.

Maintaining this harmonic relationship was critical because the perpetuation of life was dependent upon the interconnections between these worlds. Indeed, humans, animals, spirits, and everything in this multi-layered universe was believed to share the same fundamental essence, and the concept of transformation – humans into humans, humans into animals, animals into humans, animals into animals, spirits into animals, spirits into humans, spirits into spirits – permeated mythological traditions and daily life and was expressed in many forms of material culture, including tattoo.

From this point of view, tattooing embodied a Native cosmological system that helped to visualize and validate individual, family, clan, and tribally defined cultural values. As a visual language, tattoo expressed the many ways in which Native North American peoples attempted to control and empower their lives, especially since life was a constant struggle and characterized by much uncertainty. Earthly existence was fleeting, but tattooing afforded individuals with the opportunity to enhance their personal power, while also defining where they came from and who they aspired to be.

This book establishes new ways of seeing and reading the messages encoded in ancient and

3 | Unangan (Aleut) Woman of Unalaska Island, Alaska, displaying facial tattoos and labrets. After Grasset de Saint-Sauveur (1796).

more contemporary forms of Native North American tattooing, but it would not have been possible without the stories of the many people featured within its pages. Some of these people I know by name, but the names of many others have been lost to history.

Explorers, travel writers, and early anthropologists considered these forgotten people to be ethnological specimens that helped them to document a “vanishing” way of life. Little attention was paid, for example, to the names of individual tattooers or tattoo bearers; simply linking these human “objects” to a tribe was

sufficient to place them within an explanatory and “scientific” framework for study.

While the identities of tattooers and their clients were lost through this process of historical detachment, the voices of contemporary tattooers and tattoo bearers featured in this book demonstrate the deeply personal, emotional, and spiritual motivations that compelled them to (re)create and/or bear traditional tattoo designs associated with their traditional cultures. But these individuals do not pretend to speak for their entire communities; they insist that they are responsible for their own ideas. They speak for themselves; they speak about their inspirations, desires, and personal visions.

One hundred years ago, however, Native North American tattooing culture faced an uncertain future. Only a handful of traditionally tattooed gatekeepers remained and as their numbers diminished so too did the tattooing knowledge they embraced. But there is an important backstory to this historical moment, for the road that led there was marked by a series of poignant events that can only be characterized as cultural genocide perpetuated by American and Canadian governmental forces. These disturbing factors included, but were not limited to, the breakdown of tribal society resulting from the dispossession of tribal homelands; forced removal of tribal peoples to reservations (forced incarceration, really); missionary and governmental suppression of traditional religious beliefs and cultural practices; and the removal (under threat of imprisonment) of hundreds of thousands of children from their communities of origin to federally-run boarding schools – places where Indigenous languages were banned, children were subjected to dehumanizing cruelty to strip them of their Native identity and culture, and locations where new forms of tattooing were created to test the boundaries of authority through displays of resistance.1 Despite this challenging journey, Indigenous peoples across North America persevered in the face of these overwhelming obstacles, and to fully comprehend the experience of being Indigenous in the world today requires that we never forget this bitter past.

Contemporary Native American tattoo provides a window into this difficult period of Euro-Western colonization because for many individuals their tattoos emphasize tribal resiliency, a fact that was expressed to me in a variety of statements, such as: “I wear my culture on my face every day and I own it!” or “My tattoos 8

show everyone that we’re still here and that we will ALWAYS be here!” Tattooing questions the decolonization of Native culture by visually reasserting Indigeneity through an active process of repatriating traditional customs and beliefs; practices that were central to constructing cultural identity. Tattooed skin is a potent source of pride and it bears witness to the various histories of the ancestors who sacrificed so very much so that

Native North American culture could endure and thrive today.

The continuum of Native North American tattooing tradition illustrates a vibrant cultural persistence. But tattooing is not a vaguely remembered notion, for in some places like the Arctic, traditional skin-stitched tattoo bearers continued to live into the 21st century. Even so, tattooing has always guided Native peoples’ lives 4 | Tattooed Osage elder.

Copyright National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Photo Lot-89-8, T13408.

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5 | Lenape (Delaware) leader Lapowinsa with tattooed manitou motifs (forehead, mouth) and necklace, perhaps representing a series of conjoined birds, 1735. Art

by Gustavus Heselius.

and experiences over the millennia, illustrating the continuation of deeply held beliefs that rely on tradition, which determined what tattoo designs could and could not be.

North America is home to more than one thousand Indigenous communities, each with its own history, language, and cultural practices.

Around 1850, many of these communities still practiced tattooing, and I have spent the better part of seventeen years collecting information on the indelible custom and its associated practices.

My journeys have taken me to museum collections and archives, university libraries, Native Alaskan villages, tribal reservations, and 10

the homes of many tattooed individuals and other Native knowledge experts.

As a collaborative project, this book would never have been possible without the support and tutelage of Indigenous elders, community historians, and my tattooed friends whom I greatly respect, admire, and thank for sharing their stories and experiences with me. In this context, I would like to single out my tattooed colleagues and say Wado to JP Johnson and his wife Shawna Johnson (Cherokee); Tehoovet’a xaa to L. Frank (Tongva/Ajachmem/Rarámuri); Depelda mat doyu˙t to Sage LaPena (Wintu); Gunalchéesh to Nahaan, Davina Cole, and Amanda Natkong (Tlingit); Kʷukʷscémxʷ to Dion Kaszas (Nlaka’pamux); Igamsiqanaghhalek to Yaari Kingeekuk (St. Lawrence Island Yupik); Nya:węh to Alan White (Cayuga); Qujannamiik to Alethea Arnaquq-Baril (Inuit); Txin Qaĝaasakuqing to Aquilina Lestenkof (Unangan); Thahoⁿ to Brian Lookout and Brooke Cheshewalla (Osage); Nem wennen to Ruby Tuttle (Yuki/Konkow/Maidu); Yôotva to Lena Bommelyn (Karuk); and Shu’ shaa nin-la to Marva Jones and Loren Bommelyn (Dee-ni’).

Over the years, other individuals in the Native and non-Native community provided guidance, contacts, stories, photography, tattoo knowledge, humor, and warm meals and coffee when I needed it most. In this regard, I extend my appreciation and deepest gratitude to the Osage Traditional Cultural Advisors, Andrea Hunter, Welana Fields, and Kathryn Red Corn (Osage); Christopher Koonooka, Vera Metcalf, Mattox Metcalf, and George Noongwook (St. Lawrence Island Yupik); Steve Henrikson and Scott Carrlee (Alaska State Museum); Colette Lemmon (Iroquois Museum); Michael Galban (Washoe/Mono Lake Paiute; Ganondagan State Historic Site), Lance Foster (Ioway); John Rohner; Jon and Tanya Derksen; Bernard Saladin D’Anglure; Norman Hallendy; Edmund (Ted) Carpenter; Richard Harrington; Dan Monteith; Aaron Deter-Wolf; Carol Diaz-Granados; Jim Duncan; Matthias Reuss; Maggie Dittemore (John Wesley Powell Library of Anthropology); and Gina Rappaport and Stephanie Ogenski (National Anthropological Archives). Moreover, documenting the history and significance of Native North American tattoo would have been quite difficult without the assistance of the following collectors, galleries, archives, libraries, and other institutions that provided permission to reproduce written documents, publications, objects of material culture, and photography: 11

University of Texas Press; Donald Ellis Gallery; John and Marva Warnock Collection; National Museum of Natural History; Smithsonian Institution Archives; National Museum of the American Indian; New-York Historical Society; Royal Library of Denmark; Bibliothèque Nationale de France; John Trumbull Collection at the Yale University Art Gallery; Minnesota Historical Society; National Archives of Canada; American Museum of Natural History; Gilcrease Museum; and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Financial support provided by the Whatcom Museum of History and Art (Bellingham, WA) Jacobs Research Fund and University of Alaska (Fairbanks, AK) Museum Otto Geist Fund allowed me to travel to Alaska, the Great Plains, California, and beyond and meet collaborators whose experiences inspired the publication of this book. I would also like to give special recognition to Ron Smit and his staff at Foundation LM Publishers for bringing my dream into reality by publishing this work. Numerous others also assisted me during the course of writing and editing this book, and I thank you all.

Lars Krutak Washington, D.C. 2014

CHUKCHI SIBERIAN YUPIK MARITIME CHUKCHI

INUPIAT

BERING STRAIT ESKIMO ST. LAWRENCE ISLAND YUPIGET

AMMASSALIMNIUT

KOTZEBUE SOUND ESKIMO

WEST GREENLAND INUIT

KOYUKON AVVAGMIUT INGALIK UNANGAN ALUTIIQ

TUNUNIRMIUT

GWICH’IN

IGLULINGMIUT KITLINERMIUT

CHUGACHMIUT EYAK

NATSILINGMIUT SAHTÚ

AIVILINGMIUT QAIRNIRMIUT

KASKA TLINGIT INLAND TLINGIT TAHLTAN SEKANI HAIDA DAKELH

SALLIRMIUT

LABRADOR INUIT DENÉSOLINÉ

WOODS CREE

TSILHQOT’IN WET’SUWET’EN SECWEPEMC KWAKWAKA’WAKH ST’AT’IMC UCLUELET ’NLAKA’PAMUX NUU-CHAH-NULTH OKANAGAN LEKUNGEN QUILEUTE SKOKOMISH QUINAULT TLAKLUIT

NUNAVIMMIUT

PLAINS CREE BERENS RIVER OJIBWE

KALISPEL SCHITSU’UMSH

MI’KMAQ

MAHICAN MOHAWK OTTAWA CHIPPEWA ONEIDA ONONDAGA MENOMINEE CAYUGA POTAWATOMI YANKTON SENECA DAKOTA SIOUX MESKWAKI DELAWARE PRARIE CHEYENNE PONCA POTAWATOMI ARAPAHO OMAHA VIRGINIA ALGONQUIANS IOWAY ILLINOIS OTOE KAW NORTH CAROLINA MISSOURIA ALGONQUIANS OSAGE ASSINIBOINE HIDATSA MANDAN

KALAPUYAN DEE’NI KARUK YUROK HUPA WIYOT BEAR RIVER WINTU ATSUGEWI NOMLAKI MAIDU MATTOLE WAILAKI KONKOW SINKYONE PAIUTE COAST YUKI, YUKI, HUCHNOM GOSHUTE POMO COAST MIWOK SAKLAN YOKUTS COSTANOAN TÜBATULABAL TONGVA HAVASUPAI AJACHMEM HUALAPAI YAVAPAI MOHAVE CAHUILLA APACHE HALCHIDHOMA PAYÓMKAWICHUM KWTSAAN AKIMEL O’OTHAM KUMEYAAY COCOPAH MARICOPA TOHONO O’OODHAM

QUAPAW WICHITA PREHISTORIC MISSISSIPPIAN CHICKASAW CADDO CHOCTAW TONKAWA NATCHEZ CHITIMACHA

YUCHI CHEROKEE YAMACRAW CREEK TIMUCUA

12

INTRODUCTION “The women are marked on the face with blewe streekes down the cheekes and round about the eies…Also, some of their women race [scratch or pierce] their faces proportionally, as chinne, cheekes, and forehead, and the wristes of their hands, whereupon they lay a colour, which continueth dark azurine.”

Sir Martin Frobisher, describing Inuit encountered at Frobisher Bay, 1576.

6 | Alaskan Eskimos from Kotzebue Sound wearing labrets and tattoos, 1816.

After Choris (1822: pl. II).

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In 1566, a tattooed Canadian Inuit woman and her unmarked child were kidnapped by French sailors in Labrador and brought to Antwerp in Belgium. Shortly thereafter, the “savage” family, dressed in sealskins, was put on display for money in The Hague, and in other locales in Germany.1 Although the fate of the woman and child is not known, illustrated handbills survive advertising their exhibition and the incredible “true” circumstances surrounding their capture, including the death of the woman’s husband – a giant – at the hands of European mariners:

This woman with her husband and little child were met by the French…and the husband was shot through his body with an arrow. However he would not surrender but took his stand bravely to defend himself [and his family]; and in the skirmish he was severely wounded in the side by another Frenchman with a broadsword, then he took his own blood from his side in his hand and licked it out of his hand, and took his stand to defend himself more fiercely than before. Finally he was struck and wounded in his throat so severely that he fell to the ground

7 | Canadian Inuit family kidnapped by French sailors in 1566.

(Notice the tattoos on the woman’s face.)

This woodblock print is the oldest known European depiction of Eskimos and Native North American tattooing drawn from life.

14

8 | “Hanje,” a Mohave woman with facial painting and chin tattoos, ca. 1883.

Photographer Ben Wittick.

Copyright National Anthropological Archives, INV 2259300.

and died from his wound. This man was 12 feet tall and had in twelve days killed 11 [12] people with his own hand…in order to eat them, because they like to eat no flesh better than human flesh. And as they seized the woman she took her stand as if she were completely raving and mad because of her child whom she would have to leave behind…[T]hen they took the woman with her child and brought her away…The paint marks she has on her face are entirely blue, like sky blue, and these the husband makes on his wife [when he takes her for his wife] so that he recognizes her by them, for otherwise they run among one another like beasts, and the marks cannot be taken off again with any substance…Let us thank God the Almighty for His blessings that He has enlightened us with His word so that we are not such savage people and man-eaters as are in this district, that this woman was captured and brought out of there since she knows nothing of the true God but lives almost more wickedly than the beasts. God grant that she be converted to acknowledge Him. Amen.2

These sixteenth century documents are important for two primary reasons. First, they provide the earliest known depictions of a tattooed Native North American individual drawn from life.3 Secondly, the exaggerated (and disturbing) visions they created were at the very heart of a colonial gaze that dehumanized, exoticized, and stereotyped Native American tribal peoples in an attempt to demonstrate just how “heathen” they were, especially when compared to the sacred Christian culture and doctrines of “more sophisticated” Euro-Americans who wanted to “save” them. But collecting living people from unknown lands served other purposes; they were trophies and objects of curiosity and desire.4 And once captured on a handbill, broadside, or book page they could also be traded and even destroyed.

Over time, many more tattooed Native Americans were brought to Europe for the purposes of display or exhibition (e.g., 1577, Inuit captives; 1719, Choctaw and Creek “American Princes;” 1883, Omaha ‹‹Peaux-Rouges›› “Redskins”), while other tattooed personages travelled on official business (e.g., 1710, Mohawk and Mahican “Indian Kings;” 1730, Cherokee “Ambassadors;” 1734, Yamacraw-Creek Delegation; 1762, Cherokee “Kings”).5 As never before seen cultural curiosities garbed in traditional costumes with skins indelibly adorned, it is no small wonder that some people who encountered tattooed Native Americans in Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries also were utterly captivated by them, or in the words of one writer: “their Visages are very awful [i.e., inspired awe] and majestick…and the Marks with which they disfigure their Faces, do not seem to carry so much Terror as Regard.”6 Since that time, however, the tattooing practices of Native North Americans have largely received little attention. Only a few studies exist of Native North American tattoo and these are largely confined to an inventory of historical accounts7 and regional overviews of the tradition as practiced in the Great Plains and Eastern Woodlands,8 California,9 the Canadian Arctic,10 and New France.11 This is surprising because the custom encompassed nearly all areas of the North American continent. From the Arctic to California, New York to the Great Plains and beyond, Native peoples employed tattoos for a variety of purposes.

And whether for therapeutic medicine, marking significant life achievements, or asserting tribal identity, tattoos were worn as meaningful symbols that articulated the Indigenous ethos of the world.

But just as tattoos were grounded in Indigenous beliefs and cultural values, they were also grounded in personal experiences, genealogies, and encounters with the supernatural. For example, some body marks were understood to promote one’s fertility or attract prey animals,12 while others revealed tribal origins. Still more were thought to provide physical or spiritual protection from enemies, evil spirits and other unseen beings, amongst other attributes.13 The spiritual forces that embodied these kinds of tattoos were not necessarily related to the form or actual symbol placed upon the skin. Instead, the magical properties were often infused in the tattoo pigments, the tattoo instruments, or they were channeled into the design by the tattooer, who among some tribes was a priest or shaman.14 In such cases, the efficacy of these tattoos typically arose from helper, ancestral, and other spirits or deities that were petitioned by the tattooer to lend their otherworldly powers.

It is important to note here that Native North Americans rarely perceived traditional tattooing as an art form, and for these reasons I will largely avoid the term “tattoo artist” altogether in this book. However, I do recognize that tattooing was occasionally used for beautification and that certain tattooists were very proud of their artistic creations. Alice Yaavgaghsiq (Aghwalngiq), the last living tattooer of St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, 9 | Sallirmiut woman of Southampton Island, Hudson Bay, 1903-1904.

Photographer Albert P. Low. Her facial tattoos were overpainted for photography. Library and Archives Canada, 2804.

“approached her works the way a sculptor evaluates a piece of marble.”15 For example, Yaavgaghsiq considered the intersection of facial lines and a woman’s facial bone structure, and then envisioned ways to complement them with her skin-stitched tattoos. Speaking to Anchorage Daily News reporter Mike Dunham in 1997, she tapped her chest and said: “My designs came from my heart.”16

An Etymological Comment on Culture Groups and Indigenous Peoples Over the centuries, various terms have been used in ethnology to identify the Indigenous peoples of North America. Because these words were imposed upon tribal groups from the outside, they are oftentimes incorrect and/or offensive and have little to do with what Native people call themselves today. These designations – often the result of incorrect pronunciations or misunderstandings – crept into the literature because an explorer, a trader, a missionary, a government agent, or an anthropologist found the term (or terms) definitive and useful. For example, Inuit (“the people”) replaces “Eskimo” (“eaters of raw flesh”)17 in many regions of Arctic Canada, whereas Yupiit (“real people”) and Inupiat (“real people”) replace “Inuit” in many regions of Arctic Alaska. In the Aleutian Archipelago, the Russian term “Aleut” (unknown derivation) has been replaced by Unangan (“coastal people”). Obviously, the Indigenous selfdesignations noted above are not derogatory, alienating, or judgmental. Rather, they are inclusive and describe a culture group’s position in a community today as well as before contact with missionaries, anthropologists, and other outsiders.

Another longstanding ethnological tradition is the usage of the “culture area” concept. This classificatory method was developed in the late nineteenth century to conveniently organize Native societies of North America, according to specific geographical regions where similarities in environment, subsistence, culture, and language were shown to exist. Although I realize that there are problems with the culture area concept, it does provide a convenient framework for exploring the history of Indigenous tattooing in North America and will be used to some degree in this book. As will be shown, numerous

16

similarities in tattooing culture existed across certain cultural areas, and there were also forms of tattooing (e.g., “guardian” tattoos, medicinal tattoos, etc.) that were employed across several culture regions.

Tattoo Traditions of Native North America Today, many of the former symbolic associations and meanings of Native North American tattoo are simply irretrievable. That is because this knowledge was not recorded in the past and subsequently has been lost. However, this book pieces together the extant sources of historical evidence for Native North American tattooing through a survey of published and unpublished accounts, prehistoric and historic artifacts, portrait art, and oral histories. I utilize the works of explorers, missionaries, historians, ethnologists, Native North Americans, and anthropologists, and also draw upon my own field research with contemporary Indigenous tattoo bearers living in the United States, Canada, and Nunavut. My goal in this work is to retrieve the available sources of Native North American tattoo tradition in order to uncover the multiple – and sometimes related – meanings that tattoos have carried over the millennia, while also recognizing the significance of this cultural practice that has remained a largely forgotten subject of study for far too long. Moreover, I want to acknowledge the artistic achievements of Indigenous tattooists who for thousands of years plied human skin with natural tools and lasting designs. It is my hope that this book will promote a greater understanding of these remarkable (and largely anonymous) individuals through raising awareness of their epidermic talents.

10 | Haida tattoo marks: raven, Tchimose, and bear.

The Tchimose is a fabulous animal supposed to drift about in the ocean like a log of wood and believed to be very destructive to canoes or individuals who may fall into its clutches. The hat shown in the drawing indicates that the creature belongs to the more powerful class of mythological beings inhabiting the Haida world.

After Swan (1874: pl. 6).

17

11 | Facial tattooing of a ’Nlaka’pamux man and Okanagan woman, ca. 1880.

The chin markings were called “eagle’s tail” and the vertical lines on the woman’s face “rain coming from the sky.” After Teit (1930a:410, fig. 41).

CHUKCHI SIBERIAN YUPIK MARITIME CHUKCHI

INUPIAT

BERING STRAIT ESKIMO ST. LAWRENCE ISLAND YUPIGET

AMMASSALIMNIUT

KOTZEBUE SOUND ESKIMO

WEST GREENLAND INUIT

KOYUKON AVVAGMIUT INGALIK UNANGAN ALUTIIQ

GWICH’IN

TUNUNIRMIUT IGLULINGMIUT

KITLINERMIUT CHUGACHMIUT EYAK

NATSILINGMIUT SAHTÚ

AIVILINGMIUT QAIRNIRMIUT

KASKA

SALLIRMIUT

NUNAVIMMIUT LABRADOR INUIT

DENÉSOLINÉ

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ARCTIC AND SUBARCTIC “It seems like those folks who were born after 1915 stopped getting tattoos. Some were actually feeling fortunate for not being tattooed, and some were feeling ashamed for being tattooed, saying they didn’t like them. Perhaps some were embarrassed about their tattoos, as some may have been influenced by the Christianity of those times.

But how powerful the ancient tattooing was that they left and carried it away with them! And though some today may try to revive tattooing traditionally, some – at least – have used pencils to make tattoo during events like Yupik Days. Perhaps some may use the real material and soot to get the tattoos that our ancestors used; tattoos used to beautify in order to sturdily continue that part of the tradition of our Yupik culture.”

Christopher Koonooka (Petuwaq), St. Lawrence Island Yupik Educator (Krutak 2003:7).

12 | Siberian Yupik or Maritime Chukchi woman of Chukotka, 1816.

Watercolor by Louis Choris.

Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Collection of Western Americana.

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13 | Aivilik Inuit woman Niviatsinaq (“Shoofly Comer”) in ‘fancy’ dress, 1904. Photographer Albert P. Low. Library and Archives Canada, PA-053548.

14 | Tattooed Eskimo woman from Bering Strait region, ca. 1910. Postcard from the collection of the author.

15 | Palaeo-Eskimo ivory maskette representing the oldest known human portrait from the Arctic.

Tattoos cover the woman’s face. Canadian Museum of History, QkHn-13:489, IMG2013-0146-0008-Dm.

Faces from the Past Perhaps the oldest archaeological evidence for tattooing in North America is a 3,500-year-old Palaeo-Eskimo maskette from Devon Island, Nunavut. This naturalistically carved female face displays numerous linear tattoos that are remarkably similar to those worn by the captive Labrador Inuit woman displayed in sixteenthcentury Europe, and 2,000-year-old ivory figurines and “doll heads� from Bering Strait in the western Arctic that possess tattoos related to medicinal therapy,1 hunting tallies, and other cultural information.2 As will be shown in later chapters, facial tattooing was an exceedingly popular form of

body marking across Native North America. This is so because the human face is a vehicle for perception and self-image, and the usual location we look to before making our initial impressions of the people we interact with. Facial tattooing, then, functioned as a kind of interface where many kinds of information could be communicated, including concepts that embodied beauty, strength, fear, affiliation, mystery, accomplishment, and religious belief.

In the Arctic, the origins of tattooing are part of an ancient tale, a story that has various versions but a common theme. From Greenland to the shores of the great Hudson Bay, to Iglulik and Talotoak (Nunavut), and across the frozen Polar Sea to Bering Strait, tattooing is linked to a myth revolving around incest, the seal-oil lamp, facial marking, and the evolution of the Sun and the Moon. The naturalist and ethnographer Lucien M. Turner, speaking of the Nunavimmiut (Inuit) of Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, Quebec, wrote in 1887: The sun is supposed to be a woman. The moon is a man and the brother of the woman who is the sun. She was accustomed to lie on her bed in the house [of her parents] and was finally visited during the night by a man whom she could never discover the identity. She determined to ascertain who it was and in

16 | Tattooed Qairnirmiut, Aivilingmiut, and Natsilingmiut women. After Boas (1901-1907:108).

17 | Qairnirmiut (Caribou Eskimo) facial tattooing.

After Birket-Smith (1929:228, fig. 88).

order to do so blackened her nipples with a mixture of oil and lampblack. She was visited again and when the man applied his lips to her breast they became black. The next morning she discovered to her horror that her own brother had the mark on his lips. Her emoternation knew no bounds and her parents discovered her agitation and made her reveal the cause. The parents were so indignant that they upbraided them and the girl in her shame fled from the village at night. As she ran past the fire she seized an ember and fled beyond the earth [rising to the sky as the sun]. Her brother pursued her and so the sparks fell from the torch [and] they became the stars in the sky. The brother pursued her [into the sky and became the moon] but is able to overtake her on rare occasions. These occasions are eclipses. When the moon wanes from sight the brother is supposed to be hiding for the approach of his sister.3 Some 90 years later, French anthropologist Bernard Saladin D’Anglure interviewed Mitiarjuk, a Nunavimmiut woman from Kangirsujuaq,

Nunavik. She explained to Saladin D’Anglure that all girls had to receive facial tattoos when they first menstruated. That was because their menstrual blood was polluting (e.g., it scared away game animals because it was unclean) and tattooing was a rite of purification. If Nunavimmiut women did not follow custom, it was believed that after death the skin on their faces would become severely burned by the Sun spirit (Siqiniq, “sister sun”), because she was displeased by unmarked faces.4 Atuat Ittukusuk, the last fully tattooed Inuit woman of Igloolik, Nunavut, remembered that “it felt like your skin was burning,” after she received her tattoos.

“They are signs to show that you are becoming a woman.”5 Thousands of miles to the west at Point Hope (Tikigaq), Alaska, female facial tattooing was also linked to menstrual bleeding. It is inscribed on the Sun and Moon story too, because these heavenly bodies tattooed each other: The sun sister smears her brother with lamp soot, then mutilates her [breast] with her ulu – a half-moon-shaped slate knife used by women. When, in post-myth-time, the sun first rises after the winter solstice, the sister is still streaked with blood; the moon’s face is patched [tattooed] in its black and white phases.

When round-faced Tikigaq girls first menstruate the skin between the mouth and chin is mutilated…Tattooing is soot smears [from the lamp], fire-sparks, speckles, the sun’s streaking. And daubed liked her brother, as she raises her face to tatqim inua [the moon spirit], the woman is his separated, sublunary replica.6 Interestingly, as we deconstruct the symbolic elements of the Sun and Moon myth we begin to observe wider cosmological perceptions of nature through menstrual blood, tattooing, and the symbolism embodied in the seal-oil lamp.

Menstrual blood relates to the ambiguous 22

18 | Natsilingmiut (Netsilik) facial tattooing, 1904.

Photographer Albert P. Low. The tattoos were overpainted for photography.

Left: Library and Archives Canada, 2860. Right: After Low (1906).

19 | Natsilingmiut elder Mary Edetoak from Taloyoak (Spence Bay).

Library and Archives Canada, E10933397.

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position a person occupies en passage between (latent) death and life, or the potentiality for bearing new life. The seal oil lamp produces heat and is specifically connected to fire and the Sun. Through its transformative capacities, the fire of the domestic oil lamp changes food, like raw and bloody meat, into an edible meal. In symbolic terms of the tattooing myth, the soot smears from

the oil lamp, which were generated by fire, cooked the flesh, definitively separating the “raw” (immature woman) from the “cooked” (socialized woman). In life, the function of female facial tattooing also performed this function: when it was placed on the girl’s skin after her first menstruation it separated the prepubescent “girl” from the “woman.” More than simply enhancing life tattoo also enabled life, because its heat ritually “cooked” the woman until she achieved maturation.7 Apart from facial marking, female hand tattooing is related to important mythological traditions associated with another powerful Eskimo deity, the “mistress of marine animals,”8 who ultimately controlled the movements of all sea mammals and the fuel source for seal-oil lamps (i.e., seal fat), among many other things.

Known by various names across the Arctic (Sedna, Nuliajuq, Taliilajuq, Takannaaluk, Uinigumasuittuq, Arnarquaqsâq, etc.), the sea goddess “had many names because people were afraid to utter her actual name, so people would refer to her with descriptive names,” said tattooed Inuit filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril.9 The Danish anthropologist and explorer Knud Rasmussen agreed, “[I]ndeed [they] are afraid to utter the name of Nuliajuk, and simply say Takana, ‘the one down there.’”10 Some of these descriptive names included: “she who did not wish to marry” (Uinigumasuittuq),11 and “the great woman from below” (Takannaaluk or Kannaaluk).12 Among the Natsilingmiut (Nestilik), her name was Nuliajuq (“the copulating one”) and she was the most powerful of the great spirits, as the following story relates:

20 | Higilaq, a tattooed Kitlinermiut (Copper Eskimo) woman, 1915.

Photographer George H. Wilkins. Library and Archives Canada, 51648.

At all time she makes mankind feel how she vigilantly and mercilessly takes care that all souls, of both animals and mankind, are shown the respect that ancient rules of life demand.

She rules through to˙nrät [helping spirits]…By means of these she either makes the animals visible and easy to hunt, so that people have food enough and clothing and warmth, or she makes them invisible, lets them disappear entirely, so that mankind has to go hungry and cold.

Through the same spirits she can influence wind and weather, especially pErsƆq: blizzard, which prevents hunting trips and hunting at the breathing holes.13 Nuliajuq controlled the sea mammals because they originally sprang from her severed finger joints. As the Natsilingmiut elder Nâlungiaq14 recounted:

Once in times long ago past people…were going across the water and had made rafts of kayaks tied together. They were many and were in haste to get away to new hunting grounds.

And there was not much room on the rafts they tied together.

At the village there was a little [orphan] girl whose name was Nuliajuk. She jumped out on to the raft together with the other boys and girls, but no one cared about her, no one was related to her, and so they seized her and threw her into the water. In vain she tried to get hold of the edge of the raft; they cut [the tips of ] her fingers off, and lo! As she sank to the bottom the stumps of her finger [tips] became alive in the water and bobbed up around the raft like seals. That was how the seals came. But Nuliajuk herself sank to the bottom of the sea.

There she became a spirit, the sea spirit, and she became the mother of the sea beasts, because the seals had formed out of her 24

21 | Kitlinermiut facial tattoo patterns. Redrawn after Jenness (1946:52).

22 | Kitlinermiut (Copper Eskimo) tattoo styles for women. Redrawn after Jenness (1946:53).

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fingers that were cut off. And she also became mistress of everything else alive, the land beasts too, that mankind had to hunt.15 In other versions of this ancient tale, bearded seals, walruses, and whales also emanated from other finger joints, as Nuliajuk’s hands were repeatedly cut until only stumps remained.16 It was believed by many Inuit peoples that the souls of the dead must pass the house of Nuliajuk on their journey into the afterlife. She “alone determines where they are to dwell; those who have lived a good life without breach of taboo are sent on at once to the Land of Day, whereas those who have failed to observe the ancient rules of life are detained in her house to expatiate their misdeeds, before being allowed to proceed.”17 “She notices every little breach of taboo, for she knows everything,”18 and those individuals whose offenses against taboo were not wiped out by a violent death traveled to the Sea Spirit for purification before they could pass to the land of

the “blessed,” that was located in the sky and filled with bounty.19 Here, human souls had to remain through a period of purgatory, the length of time varying according to the magnitude of the offence, with bestiality (for men) and concealment of menstruation or abortion (for women)20 being the worst offenses. Because “[w]omen during the menstrual period are especially unclean in relation to all animals hunted, and may thus expose the entire community to the greatest danger and disaster if they endeavor to conceal their impurity,”21 concealing one’s menses was absolutely condemned.22 But game animals and spirits also observed the actions of humans. Anthropologist Franz Boas wrote: The souls of the sea animals are endowed with greater powers than those of ordinary human beings. They can see the effect of contact with a corpse, which causes objects touched by it to appear dark in color; and they can see the effect of flowing human blood, from which a vapor rises that surrounds the bleeding person and is communicated to every one and every thing that comes in contact with such a person. This vapor and the dark color of death are exceedingly unpleasant to the souls of the sea animals, which will not come near a hunter thus affected. The hunter must therefore avoid contact with people who have touched a body or with those who are bleeding, more particularly with menstruating women or with