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