Native Americans
Native Americans Revitalize Ancient Tattoo Traditions
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.
Today, a growing number of Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiians are reviving tattooing, using methods their ancestors developed millennia ago.
Jody Potts-Joseph was born and raised in the Yukon River village of Eagle, home of the Athabascan-speaking Han Gwich’in people.
“I was raised pretty old school on the land and learned our traditional way of life, hunting and fishing for subsistence,” she said. “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.”
For years, Potts-Joseph wanted to have her chin marked, but the last Gwich’in tattoo artists had passed away. Her daughter, Quannah Chasinghorse, also wanted a tattoo.
“She was only 12 at the time, and I told her to wait,” Potts-Joseph said. “I wanted to make sure that she was in an emotional space where she could handle any possible criticism or backlash.”
After two years of praying on it, Potts-Joseph relented. Using a large ink-dipped sewing needle, she gave her daughter what are called Yidiiltoo — lines at her eyes and on her chin. Soon afterward, Potts-Joseph enlisted her then-16-year-old son Izzy to ink her chin.
“For me, it was a reclaiming of my identity and part of my resistance to the shaming of our people after colonization,” she said. “And I saw my daughter change — she came into her power. She found her voice. Tattooing is powerful medicine.”
Markers of identity, spirituality, rank
Cultural anthropologist Lars Krutak, author of “Tattoo Traditions of Native North America,” has studied the traditions in 30 countries.
As 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.
“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,” he said, explaining that 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.”
Traditional tattooing served many functions.
“For one, marks could identify an individual’s family, clan, tribe or society,” Krutak said.
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.
“There were therapeutic tattoos that were applied to primary joints to relieve arthritis,” he said. “I’ve documented tribes from Borneo to Alaska to Papua New Guinea who tattoo joint marks.”
Tattoos often marked milestones and achievements, such as a young hunter’s first kill.
“In some tribes in the Plains, you could read a man’s achievements on the battlefield by the marks he wore,” Krutak said.
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.
A blind eye
Artist, writer and educator L. Frank Manriquez is descended from the Tongva and Acjachemen tribes of Southern California, which have seen a rebirth of traditional Indigenous tattooing.
“I’d thought about it for a long time,” Manriquez said. “For me, it was about the connection, a way to hold hands across time with my women ancestors.”
She was 40 years old when she got her first tattoo, from “a racist Chumash biker guy,” she said, laughing. He used a modern tattoo gun to ink parallel lines on her cheekbones.
Later, she 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 said. “And what it means spiritually is that I can see what others cannot.”
Like Potts-Joseph in Alaska, Manriquez said tattoos have changed her life.
“Non-Native Californians started treating me as if I were wearing priest robes,” she said. “All of a sudden, I was something they could not understand. But Native Americans listen to me differently, treat me differently.”
‘Not a trend’
Tattooing, once considered the domain of sailors, inmates and carnival barkers, has gone mainstream in America. In January 2022, Rasmussen Reports found that half of all Americans under age 40 wore at least one tattoo, up from 38% in 2016.
Many non-Natives draw inspiration from — if not outright copy — traditional Indigenous tattoos, a fact that angers Potts-Joseph. Her daughter, Chasinghorse’s, modeling career exploded in 2020 after being featured in a Calvin Klein advertising campaign.
Since then, Chasinghorse has appeared on fashion runways, at galas on and magazine covers internationally. This has given her a platform to advocate for climate justice and Indigenous inclusion. But the exposure has come at a cost.
“I look on social media and I’m seeing non-Native men and women wearing Quannah’s exact markings,” Potts-Joseph said. “We are very much opposed to anyone outside of our culture wearing traditional tattoos.”
“This is our culture, our family, our ceremony,” she added. “This is not a trend.”
Both Sacred and Secular: The Tattoos of Indigenous North Americans
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Native Americans react to Biden apology as a good ‘first step’
President Joe Biden visited the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona on Friday to deliver a long-awaited official apology to Native Americans for the federal boarding school system that severed the family, tribal and cultural ties of thousands of Indian children over multiple generations.
“I say this with all sincerity: This, to me, is one the most consequential things I've ever had an opportunity to do in my whole career as president of the United States,” Biden said.
He described how Native children were “stolen, taken away to places they didn't know by people they'd never met who spoke a language they had never heard,” he said.
“Children would arrive at school, their clothes taken off, their hair that they were told [was] sacred was chopped off, their names literally erased and replaced by a number or an English name,” he continued, “emotionally, physically and sexually abused, forced into hard labor, some put up for adoption without the consent of their birth parents, some left for dead in unmarked graves.”
When the time came to apologize, Biden shouted the words, “I formally apologize!”
Mixed reactions
In 2021, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched an investigation into federal and federally funded Indian boarding schools. The investigation confirmed that more than 18,600 Native American, Native Alaskan and Native Hawaiian children were forced to attend residential schools; 1,000 died during their enrollment.
The report recommended the U.S. government formally acknowledge and apologize for its role in the system and take steps to help survivors heal from its effects.
VOA spoke with Christine Diindiisi McCleave, a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota and former CEO of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS), which collaborated with the Interior investigation.
“I think politically it is extremely significant that Biden traveled to tribal lands in Gila River to deliver the apology publicly, not bury it in a defense appropriations bill,” she said, referencing a 2009 defense spending bill that acknowledged “years of official depredations, ill-conceived policies and the breaking of covenants” and apologized for instances of “violence, maltreatment and neglect.”
“However, as a survivor, as somebody who worked for many years to make progress on this issue, yes, we need the acknowledgment, but we also need actions to follow that up,” she said.
Friday’s apology came late in Biden’s term. McCleave said she worried that a Republican win in the November 5 presidential vote could reverse the gains for tribes made during the Biden-Harris administration.
“I hope they pass the Truth and Healing Commission bill before the new term begins,” she said.
The bipartisan Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act, currently making its way through Congress, would create a commission to investigate the boarding school system and recommend action to promote healing.
Schools only part of the story
On Friday, Biden summarized his investments in Indian Country, which include $32 billion from the American Rescue Plan, $13 billion to support improvements in tribal infrastructure and $700 million from the Inflation Reduction Act to combat the effects of climate change.
He did not, however, address growing calls from Native communities for the return of historic lands, a campaign dubbed “Land Back.”
Brenda J. Child, a citizen of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa in Minnesota, is a professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota who has written extensively about Indian boarding schools from the perspective of Indigenous Americans.
“Boarding schools were about dispossessing Indian people of their lands,” she said, “which went hand in hand with the complex policy called the General Allotment Act of 1887, which helped break up the traditional systems of land tenure.”
Also known as the Dawes Act, it divided Native Americans’ communal tribal lands into individual plots that were doled out to families and individuals. The leftover land – about 36 million hectares (90 million acres) – was opened up for sale to non-Native settlers, passing out of Indian control.
“So, what do we do now?” Child asked. “Apologies are nice, but if you don't change the behavior, we're still stuck. Now it's time to return some of that land that we lost.”
Watch Biden’s entire speech below:
One of the last Navajo Code Talkers from World War II dies at 107
John Kinsel Sr., one of the last remaining Navajo Code Talkers who transmitted messages during World War II based on the tribe's native language, has died. He was 107.
Navajo Nation officials in Window Rock announced Kinsel's death on Saturday.
Tribal President Buu Nygren has ordered all flags on the reservation to be flown at half-staff until Oct. 27 at sunset to honor Kinsel.
"Mr. Kinsel was a Marine who bravely and selflessly fought for all of us in the most terrifying circumstances with the greatest responsibility as a Navajo Code Talker," Nygren said in a statement Sunday.
With Kinsel's death, only two original Navajo Code Talkers are still alive: Former Navajo Chairman Peter MacDonald and Thomas H. Begay.
Hundreds of Navajos were recruited by the Marines to serve as Code Talkers during the war, transmitting messages based on their then-unwritten native language.
They confounded Japanese military cryptologists during World War II and participated in all assaults the Marines led in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945, including at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu and Iwo Jima.
The Code Talkers sent thousands of messages without error on Japanese troop movements, battlefield tactics and other communications crucial to the war's ultimate outcome.
Kinsel was born in Cove, Arizona, and lived in the Navajo community of Lukachukai.
He enlisted in the Marines in 1942 and became an elite Code Talker, serving with the 9th Marine Regiment and the 3rd Marine Division during the Battle of Iwo Jima.
President Ronald Reagan established Navajo Code Talkers Day in 1982 and the Aug. 14 holiday honors all the tribes associated with the war effort.
The day is an Arizona state holiday and Navajo Nation holiday on the vast reservation that occupies portions of northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico and southeastern Utah.
Native American news roundup Oct. 13 – 19, 2024
Indigenous Peoples Day and Columbus Day observed Monday
Some Americans this week celebrated Christopher Columbus’ October 1492 landing in the Western Hemisphere while others marked the alternative Indigenous Peoples’ Day commemorating the exploitation that began with Columbus’ arrival, which ultimately led to widespread displacement, violence, disease and enslavement.
The U.N. Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations in 1977 held the first International NGO Conference on Discrimination against Indigenous Populations in the Americas in Geneva. Attending delegates from Indigenous nations passed a resolution to recognize an “International Day of Solidarity with the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.”
President Joe Biden in 2021 recognized Indigenous Peoples Day as a national — but not a federal — holiday. Today, more than two dozen states and many cities across the U.S. observe the day with powwows and other cultural events.
About 2,000 people gathered at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to celebrate. VOA reporter Genia Dulot was there and filed this report:
Tribal protesters clash with police in nation’s capital
In Washington, D.C., the Indigenous People’s Day holiday brought confrontation between U.S. Park Police and protesters from the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of California, who rode across the country on horseback along a "Trail of Truth" to lobby for federal recognition that the Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) denied decades ago.
The tribe claims descent from the Verona Band of Alameda County, which inhabited the San Francisco Bay Area for over 10,000 years.
In 1989 they petitioned the BIA for federal acknowledgment as the “Ohlone/Costanoan Muwekma Tribe.” The BIA rejected their application, citing a lack of evidence showing the tribe had continuously operated since 1927 as the same or an evolved tribal entity previously acknowledged.
Protests involving 25 or more people on the National Mall or other National Park Service (NPS)-controlled areas require a permit, which the group had not obtained. Tensions escalated when police attempted to remove the group and their horses.
"The Department of the Interior's posture with Native peoples is on full display," the group posted onFacebook. "Was Indian Country naive to think that Indigenous leadership at the top was going to change the institutional culture, colonial legal architecture, and systems of oppression that have always been the core function of the Department?"
In a statement to VOA, the NPS said the group has since dismantled their camp and submitted a permit application, which is under review.
"However, enforcement actions were taken, including the arrest of one person on October 16 for assaulting a police officer and other violations. On October 15, USPP officers arrested nine others for similar offenses," the statement said.
Minnesota tribe is latest to sue social media companies
CBS News reports this week that the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in Minnesota has joined four other tribes in a lawsuit against social media giants including Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube for allegedly harming a Native American youth's mental health.
The 164-page complaint alleges that parent companies including Alphabet, ByteDance, Meta and Snap violated Minnesota laws by failing to warn users about the negative mental health effects of social media, particularly for children.
“They [Native teenagers] are more vulnerable because they've struggled with mental health because of isolation and poverty on some of the reservations,” attorney Tim Purdon, a partner in the law firm that filed the complaint, said during an interview in late July. “We seek dollars from them to be paid in our case directly to tribes to help abate or blunt or help fix the public mental health crisis that has resulted.”
Read more:
Navajo president calls for VP to resign
Navajo Nation president Buu Nygren has stripped Navajo vice president Richelle Montoya of her responsibilities and is calling for her resignation.
The announcement follows months of political tension within the tribe. In April, Montoya publicly accused the administration of intimidation and sexual harassment that she alleges took place during an August 2023 meeting in the president's office.
This prompted the tribal attorney to call for an independent investigation, which is still under way.
Nygren defended his actions in a news conference Tuesday, accusing the vice president of neglecting her official duties. He also cited Montoya’s decision to support a campaign to recall him as tribal leader.
“I welcome her resignation to make room for someone who wants to be a part of this administration,” Nygren said.
The rift between Nygren and Montoya has caused significant political upheaval, with tribal leaders and community members divided over the issues, further complicating governance and stability within the Navajo Nation.
Read more:
Lakota artist cites free speech rights, sues Colorado town
Danielle SeeWalker, a Hunkpapa Lakota artist from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, is suing the town of Vail, Colorado, after her artist residency was canceled.
As VOA reported in May, SeeWalker posted a painting titled “G is for Genocide” on Instagram. It showed a near-faceless woman wearing a feather and a keffiyeh, the traditional Bedouin headscarf that has become the symbol for solidarity with Palestinians.
“It is about me expressing the parallels between what is happening to the innocent people in Gaza ... to that of the genocide of Native American populations here in our lands,” SeeWalker wrote in her post.
The town of Vail said in a May Facebook post that its decision to cancel her residency “was not made in a vacuum; after releasing her name in an announcement, community members, including representatives from our local faith-based communities, raised concerns to town staff around SeeWalker's recent rhetoric on her social media platform about the Hamas-Israel war.”
Backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, SeeWalker claims her First Amendment rights were violated and is seeking damages.
Read more:
Indigenous Peoples Day celebrated with an eye on election
As Native Americans across the U.S. come together on Monday for Indigenous Peoples Day to celebrate their history and culture and acknowledge the ongoing challenges they face, many will do so with a focus on the election.
From a voting rally in Minneapolis featuring food, games and raffles to a public talk about the Native vote at Virginia Tech, the holiday, which comes about three weeks before Election Day, will feature a wide array of events geared toward Native voter mobilization and outreach amid a strong recognition of the power of their votes.
In 2020, Native voters proved decisive in the presidential election. Voter turnout on tribal land in Arizona increased dramatically compared with the previous presidential election, helping Joe Biden win a state that hadn’t supported a Democratic candidate in a White House contest since 1996.
Janeen Comenote, executive director of the National Urban Indian Family Coalition, which is involved with at least a dozen of these types of voting events across the country, said this year it’s especially important to mobilize Native voters because the country is selecting the president. But she cautioned that Native people are in no way a monolith in terms of how they vote.
“We’re really all about just getting Native voters out to vote, not telling them how to vote. But sort of understanding that you have a voice and you’re a democracy, a democracy that we helped create,” said Comenote, a citizen of the Quinault Indian Nation.
In Arizona, her coalition is partnering with the Phoenix Indian Center to hold a town hall Monday called “Democracy Is Indigenous: Power Of The Native Vote,” which will feature speakers and performances, along with Indigenous artwork centered on democracy.
In Apex, North Carolina, about 14 miles (23 kilometers) southwest of Raleigh, the coalition is working with the Triangle Native American Society for an event expected to include a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and a booth with nonpartisan voter information and giveaways.
While not a federal holiday, Indigenous Peoples Day is observed by 17 states, including Washington, South Dakota and Maine, as well as Washington, D.C., according to the Pew Research Center. It typically takes place on the second Monday in October, which is the same day as the Columbus Day federal holiday.
- By Genia Dulot
Los Angeles celebrates Indigenous’ Peoples Day before Columbus Day
Since 2019 the state of California officially celebrates Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of the federally recognized Columbus Day, which falls on every second Monday in October. VOA’s Genia Dulot visited the celebration at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, that drew around 2,000 people.