© NahaanNahaan, a Tlingit-Inupiaq-Paiute tattoo artist, inks a woman’s face.
To celebrate her graduation from the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Alaska Native Studies program in 2012, Marjorie Kunaq Tahbone got a tattoo. Tahbone is Inupiat, an Alaska Native people, and the design was a traditional Inupiat pattern: three solid lines that spread downward from underneath the middle of her lower lip to her chin.
Tahbone was unsure, however, how the people in her home village would react. Nome is a town of about 3,800 people on Alaska's northwestern coast, only reachable by plane or, in the warmer months, boat. Although many people there are Alaska Natives, traditional tattoos were a rare sight at that time.
Within days of receiving her tattoo, people started to notice. In a local store, a village elder reached out and touched her tattoo. In the weeks to follow, on two different occasions, babies, whom Tahbone was holding and playing with, fingered the pattern on Tahbone's face.
The infants' actions had profound resonance. Among Inupiat communities, babies receive the names of the recently deceased. When the infants touched her tattoo, Tahbone felt they were tapped into the memories of the past lives of deceased Inupiat. "When I was acknowledged by babies, it was like an acknowledgment of my ancestors," she says.
Traditionally, chin tattoos among Inupiat women like Tahbone represented a number of different milestones, such as marriage, overcoming trauma, having kids, or, as in Tahbone's case, a "coming of age." According to anthropologist Lars Krutak, a research associate at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
tattoos were closely tied up in the cultural identity of many Indigenous people. "You could tell a lot about where that person was from, what clan they belonged to, maybe what family they belonged to," he says.
Thanks to people like Tahbone, herself a scholar and tattoo artist, traditional tattoos are reappearing in Arctic and Northwest Coast Indigenous communities. As she and a handful of other researchers study and revitalize these lost arts, they are both reviving a cultural artform nearly wiped out by colonialism and getting a better understanding of the ways Indigenous communities in the north used tattoos. A tradition that once served as therapy for body and mind might now, in its restoration, treat deep cultural wounds. "When we see that ink on people, we know that we are healing from the historical trauma that occurred," Tahbone says.
Comment: If true, it wouldn't be the first time Leonardo's work was said to contain "blasphemous" details: