How Modern Day Native Americans Are Revitalizing Ancient Tattoo Traditions
By Sidra Lackey
Undated courtesy photo of Jody Potts-Joseph, left, and daughter Quannah Chasinghorse, both of whom wear traditional Han Qwich'in tattoos.
For thousands of years, tattooing was an important form of cultural expression for Indigenous people across the Americas, but missionaries abolished the practice at different points in time as part of efforts to assimilate tribes and convert them to Christianity, Cecily Hilleary of Voice of America (VOA) reports. Hilleary explores in, “Native Americans Revitalize Ancient Tattoo Traditions” how today, “a growing number of Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiians are reviving tattooing, using methods their ancestors developed millennia ago.”
A Siberian Yupik woman skin stitching the face of a young woman, c. 1900. Photo by Russian ethnographer Vladimir Bogoras.
Yukon River village of Eagle, home of the Athabascan-speaking Han Gwich’in people, is where Jody Potts-Joseph was born and raised. She said to Hilleray, “I was 18 when I learned that historically, Gwich’in men and women got tattooed — men on their joints and wrists, and women on their faces — as a rite of passage.” Potts-Joseph wanted to have her chin marked for years but the last Gwich’in tattoo artist died. Her daughter, Quannah Chasinghorse, also wanted a tattoo. “She was only 12 at the time, and I told her to wait. I wanted to make sure that she was in an emotional space where she could handle any possible criticism or backlash,” Potts-Joseph explained. She relented after two years of, “praying on it.” Then using a large, “ink-dipped sewing needle” Potts-Joseph gave her daughter, “Yidiiltoo — lines at her eyes and on her chin.” After, Potts-Joseph had her then-16-year-old son Izzy to tattoo her chin. “For me, it was a reclaiming of my identity and part of my resistance to the shaming of our people after colonization. And I saw my daughter change — she came into her power. She found her voice. Tattooing is powerful medicine,” Potts-Joseph told Hilleary.
Quannah Chasinghorse at a Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute benefit gala, Monday, Sept. 13, 2021, in New York.
Jody Potts-Joseph’s daughter, Quannah Chasinghorse’s, modeling career took off in 2020 after being featured in a Calvin Klein advertising campaign. Chasinghorse has appeared on fashion runways, at galas on and magazine covers internationally. This gave her a platform to advocate for, “climate justice and Indigenous inclusion.” But the exposure, “has come at a cost” Hilleary reported. “I look on social media and I’m seeing non-Native men and women wearing Quannah’s exact markings,” Potts-Joseph said to Hilleary. “We are very much opposed to anyone outside of our culture wearing traditional tattoos. This is our culture, our family, our ceremony. This is not a trend.”
Cultural anthropologist Lars Krutak, author of “Tattoo Traditions of Native North America,” has studied the tattoo traditions in 30 countries. When he was a University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate student, he spent time among Yupik elders living on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. Yupik, “skin-stitch their tattoos, threading fine strands of reindeer or whale sinew through a bone or steel needle, then passing the thread through pigment and stitching designs into the top layer of skin,” he told Hilleary. “Typically, they used soot or lampblack from a seal oil lamp or the bottom of a cooking pot, mix it with water or human urine,” Krutak explained, on how urine’s high ammonia content helped in the healing process. “Sometimes, graphite was mixed into the pigment because it was believed to have spirit-repelling properties.” Krutak also explained to Hilleary, “For one, marks could identify an individual’s family, clan, tribe or society.” The Tlingit, Haida and other Northwest coastal peoples, for example wore,
“hand-poked family crests as a sign of social status, lineage and relationships to natural and supernatural events.” Tattoos often marked, “milestones and achievements, such as a young hunter’s first kill.” Smithsonian anthropologists in the late 1880s reported that men of rank in the Omaha Tribe were given, “honor marks” charcoal tattoos applied with flint points bound to rattlesnake rattles, Hilleary reported further.
L. Frank Manriquez, artist, writer and educator is descended from the Tongva and Acjachemen tribes of Southern California, which have seen a, “rebirth of traditional Indigenous tattooing.” Manriquez was 40 years old when she got her first tattoo from, “a racist Chumash biker guy,” she said to Hilleary while laughing. He used a, “modern tattoo gun to ink parallel lines” on her cheekbones. Later, Manriquez had her chin tattooed with a, “traditional “triple 1” design.” Later, Manriquez met Keone Nunes, who had studied traditional Polynesian tattooing in Samoa. Nunes hand tapped Manriquez’s makapō, “a black rectangle around her left eye — a design with roots in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia.” “Makapō literally means ‘blind,’” Manriquez explained. “And what it means spiritually is that I can see what others cannot. I’d thought about it for a long time. For me, it was about the connection, a way to hold hands across time with my women ancestors.”
Like Jody Potts-Joseph in Alaska, L. Frank Manriquez Manriquez said tattoos have changed her life, Hilleary pointed out. “Non-Native Californians started treating me as if I were wearing priest robes,” Manriquez said. “All of a sudden, I was something they could not understand. But Native Americans listen to me differently, treat me differently.”