Don't Like It Don't Read It: A Brief Tattoo History From The Pacific Northwest

According to Jesuit documents, Iroquois and Mohican tattoo designs were first stenciled on the skin and then pricked into the skin with small awl-like bone tools until blood started to flow. Once the blood began flowing, crushed charcoal (sometimes red cinnabar) was vigorously rubbed into the open wounds.

Iroquois women were rarely tattooed, but if they did get tattooed, it would have been for medicinal purposes. The Iroquois men were tattooed to show their achievements on the battlefield. These tattoos included crossed hatchets on the face to record successful military expeditions. On the warriors thigh a small mark was made to indicate each enemy that the wearer had dispatched. There were many other small markings whose meaning or function has been lost in the sands of time, though many are believed to be totemic. Most tattoos were distinctly the wearers, there were no flash walls then, and a man’s tattoo was his tattoo alone.

Inuit, St. Lawrence Island Inupiaq, and other circumpolar region natives, regarded living bodies as being inhabited by multiple souls, each soul resided in a particular joint. Accordingly, all disease is nothing but the loss of a little soul; if part of a man’s body is sick (i.e. headache, flu, cancer…), it is because the little soul had left the living body. From this perspective, it is not surprising that tattoos played an important role in the funerary events;

especially on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska (St. Lawrence Island is the 6^th largest island in the U.S.). Funerary tattoos, called nafluq, consisted of small dots at the convergence of various joints: shoulders, elbows, hip, wrists, knees, ankles, neck, and the waist. For applying them, the artist (also performed by female artists as a side bar: I have a Face Book friend that is an amazing female artist, Ana McLean of Rat-a-Tat-Tat Tattoos) used a large sewing awl with whale sinew dipped into a mixture of seal oil (for lubrication), urine that worked as an antiseptic and it was believed to freeze evil spirits, and lampblack scraped from the bottom of a cooking pot.

Lifting a fold of skin, the needle was then passed through the fold, leaving two dots under the epidermis. By tattooing these dots the artist was protecting pallbearers from a spiritual attack. Death was characterized as a dangerous time when the living could be possessed by the “shade” or malevolent spirit of the recently deceased. The spirit of the dead was thought to hang around in the vicinity of its former village for some time. The “shade” was conceived as an absolute material double of the dead. Because pallbearers were in direct contact with the dead body, they were ritualistically tattooed to repel an attack. Their joints became the focus of tattoos because it was believed that the evil spirits entered the body of the living, at a joint, because these were the seats of the souls. Urine and tattoo pigments prevented evil spirits from entering the pallbearers.

A small circle under the lip, just below the corner of the mouth was to protect a man who fell from his boat fairly often to protect him from drowning. Aspects of myth suggest that labret-like tattoos recalled, in symbolic form, the appearance of an orca (killer whale). Orcas are said to have a white spot at the corners of the mouth like the labrets of the mainland Siberian natives. The labrets were carved from walrus ivory. Adopting the anatomical characteristics of the walrus’ tusks may have captured the essence of its aggressive behavior or transformed the hunter into this animal. This deceptive tattoo subverted the attention of the walrus (the walrus and killer whales were aggressive and many a hunter never returned from their hunting trip because they had been viciously attacked by one of these two hunters) and safeguarded the hunter from malicious attacks.

Men and women were variably tattooed on the upper-arm and below the lower-lip with circles, half-circles, or crosses to disguise the wearer from disease-bearing spirits. Some families have the same types of sickness that continues from generation to generation, and it was believed that these marks should be put on the child so that the spirits may think the child is of a different family. In this way, warding off the disease, specific tattoo “remedies” varied from family to family.

In the women of the region, chin stripes were the most common tattoos. They served multiple purposes in social context. Most notably, they were tattooed to show that a woman had reached puberty. Thin lines on the chin were variable indicators for choosing a wife. It was believed that a girl who laughed or smiled too much would cause the lines to spread and get thick. A girl with a full set of lines on the chin and all were thin lines was considered a good prospect for a wife, because it was obvious that she was serious and hard-working.

The capture of a whale by a young girl’s father was commemorated on her cheeks with whale flukes, which advertised her father’s prowess to members of the Asiatic Eskimo society. Females also had their thighs tattooed so that the first thing a baby sees at birth was a thing of beauty. Tattoos on the hands and feet are used like the branches of their family tree.