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