# Marks of Belonging ## Highlights ### q1 skin sewing is an traditional Arctic tattoo method > The human face is a marker of individuality. It holds clues about a person’s gender, age, mood, and ethnicity. Since time immemorial, people employed this charged surface to announce their belonging to kin groups and a place through countless modifications. In Canada’s Arctic, a preferred method for such expressions of cultural identity has been “skin sewing,” the traditional form of tattooing. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fmsj47hh4c06bgkzmeeeg7wa) > The tradition of “skin sewing” is thousands of years old, nourished by beliefs and procedures widespread in North America’s Arctic. It also had roots in the mythic realm. Nunavut girls received facial tattoos when they first menstruated. People believed that “Sister Sun” — the Sun spirit would burn the face of any woman, after her death who had not been tattooed, because unmarked faces displeased the Sun. The burning pain of a freshly stitched face was a reminder of that connection. Also, outlasting the body’s demise, face tattoos linked a woman to her ancestors, allowing the long departed to recognize her soul in the afterlife. #pkm/synthesize to [[funerary practices]] - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fmsj52r5fdyae7cef0mqb3kt) ### q2 Inuit goddess of sea beast migration origin story involves severing her fingers > Elaborate finger tattoos reminded Inuit women of another powerful deity, Sedna or Nuliajuq, the “mother of all sea beasts,” controller of the animals’ migrations. Seals, walruses, whales, and polar bears sprang from Sedna’s severed finger joints, according to her origin myth. Women passing Sedna’s home on their way to the underworld of the dead pleased and honoured her with prettily tattooed hands and black bands encircling their finger joints. Those not adorned with ink might get stuck just under the Earth’s crust, in the limbo of Nuqurmiut, where listless souls dined only on butterflies. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fmsj5nkedgr2syctyjkqgnmx) ### q3 Inuit women got maternity tattoos > Women’s intricate thigh patterns were thought to ease childbirth. Newborns beheld beauty in them, the first thing they saw as they slid from the womb. ### q4 Inuit women's tattoos were symbols of their ability to endure pain > Depending on the body part, tattooing can be excruciating — a woman’s ability to tolerate it was a measure of physical and inner endurance, both valued in a harsh environment. “You couldn’t keep your toes from wiggling,” one Pond Inlet elder recalled apropos of her nose tattoo. The pain of getting one’s knuckles incised can be seen as a sacrifice to Sedna, and perhaps, to the sea’s animals. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fmsj6t9ypa7nt8n03140r1ey) ### q5 Inuit tattoos were an important rite of passage for women > They said you weren’t a real woman until you had tattoos!” Jacob Peterloosie of Pond Inlet, Nunavut, summed up the importance of female skin markings. Above all, an Inuit woman’s tattoos proclaimed her coming of age, her domestic competence; she was now qualified to marry and run her own household. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fmsj704kd2s53g2hsbx9zpde) ### q6 Inuit male tattoos marked important milestones > Men also were tattooed, though less frequently, and illustrations showing their body designs are extremely rare. A kigjugaq between the eyes could protect you against the spirits of the deceased. While a Bathurst Inlet shaman lay “dead” — in trance —he received a nose tattoo to return him to life, as part of his initiation. Similar rite- of-passage tattoos commemorated a shaman’s slaying of a spirit; a hunter harpooning a whale; or a warrior killing an enemy. Whale tallies could be lines traced across the bridge of the nose (Cape Bathurst), or three crosses on one shoulder and four on the other — one for each whale (Mackenzie Delta). In some places, man killing and whale killing were deemed equally meritorious and celebrated with eating and storytelling while the lines were tattooed. The harpooner so honoured was often allowed to take a second wife. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fmsj7jeh3z334k0jpt2esrx1) ### q7 Inuit tattooists were female elders > The inventory of Inuit tracery comprised lines, chevrons, squares, dots, arrowheads, triangles… It had its own vocabulary: quajaq (forehead lines), tunit (cheek lines), and tablerutit (chin lines). The practitioners were almost exclusively respected older women who drew on their experience as expert seamstresses. In “skin-stitching,” they followed each pass of a needle of copper or caribou bone with a greased wood sliver dipped in lamp-black or soot from a kettle’s bottom, to insert the pigment. For “hand-poking,” they pricked a hole in the skin with a needle fixed to a handle and immediately applied soot stirred in blubber to the wound, with a second needle or stick held in the same hand at the same time. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fmsj8zcw3ywzygcm11wb0yf8) ### q8 Leviticus forbids tattoos > Inuit tattoos shocked Canadian missionaries, as they did those gawkers at Renaissance fairs. Like drum dancing and throat singing, to the clergy they spelled pagan life ways, backwardness. Scripture was the strongest indictment: “Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you” (Leviticus 19:28). Like shamanism, the practice became stigmatized and in most regions of the Arctic disappeared. On Baffin Island in the early 1920s, only a few of the youngest women still boasted facial tattoos - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fmsj9veq290e7n203cgmwnx8)