Tattoo Revival

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Artists in "Body Language: Reawakening Cultural Tattooing of the Northwest" show their tattoos. (photo by Aaron Leonen)

A gruesome installation sits in one corner of Vancouver’s Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art. It includes a Plexiglas box filled with sculptures of bloodied hands severed at the wrist. Each hand is tattooed. One, near the top, with a design that depicts smallpox scars, holds a silver cross in its palm.

The work, The halt of tattooing, by Indigenous artist Nahaan, is part of Body Language: Reawakening Cultural Tattooing of the Northwest, a fascinating group show that’s on view until January. Made from rubber, cotton, acrylic, dirt and silver, the work interprets oral histories told by Nahaan’s Tlingit ancestors about traditional tattooing, then a common practice, with special marks related to each family’s identity.

We also learn about a Tlingit woman who discovered a bentwood box of tattooed hands owned by her husband. She recognizes her uncle’s hand in the box, presumably because of its tattoo. It isn’t clear how the hands came to be chopped off. However, Nahaan links the severed hands he created to horrific practices by European colonizers and the devastating end of many of his ancestors’ cultural practices.

He notes in the exhibition catalogue that the hand with the silver cross “represents smallpox and kkkristianity which killed and shamed our people out of wearing our crest tattoos during the time shortly after kkkolonization.”

Body Language is guest-curated by Dion Kaszas, a visual artist, scholar and cultural tattoo practitioner of Nlaka’pamux, Métis and Hungarian ancestry. He recently completed a Master’s degree in Indigenous studies at UBC Okanagan in Kelowna and now works to revive Indigenous cultural and tattooing traditions.

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Chilkat robe and hand tattoo (image courtesy of Bill Reid Gallery, Vancouver)

His studies deal with the outlawing of the potlatch, an integral part of Northwest Indigenous governance, and the shaming of many other cultural activities, including tattooing and labrets, a type of mouth jewelry, which are only now being relearned. Kaszas believes that reviving his people’s traditional ways is necessary to rebuild communities and identities.

Two methods of traditional tattooing are displayed in the show: hand poking (piercing the skin with a needle to create imagery dot by dot) and skin stitching (dragging a needle threaded with ink-dipped thread through the skin, leaving stitch-length lines of ink under the skin).

In the catalogue, Kaszas says the revival of Indigenous tattooing is a process of re-indigenization. “From the few threads of my culture that remain, I work as a cultural tattoo practitioner to stitch myself back together so that I can fulfill my responsibilities to the people.”

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Norman Tait, “Portrait Mask of a Nisga’a Woman,” no date (Museum of Vancouver Collection, AA 2440)

The exhibition also includes work by other Indigenous tattooing practitioners: Nisga’a artist Nakkita Trimble, Haida artist Corey Bulpitt and Heiltsuk artist Dean Hunt.

Images of their work are displayed alongside contemporary and historical photography documenting traditional tattooing, and clothing, basketry, paintings and carvings that reflect similar motifs and designs as the tattoos. The point being made is that Northwest art, as with virtually all Indigenous art, is integrated into all aspects of life. Traditional tattoo designs are another way to display family crests.

As part of the exhibition, some of the artists spent time one day tattooing in the gallery, discussing what the designs mean to them and singing traditional songs to animate stationary objects. The show also includes a video of the artists discussing cultural tattooing.

Kaszas’ Medicine Paintings: Syemit (Prayers) for a New Day is a hopeful antidote to past horrors. He used handmade ochre, bone black and oil paint on canvas to represent a face painted with a prayer. The prayer, he says, is for a new day that “will include friendship among all peoples and our sorrow will be healed.” ■

Body Language: Reawakening Cultural Tattooing of the Northwest is on view at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art in Vancouver from June 8, 2018 to Jan. 13, 2019.