Two New Books on Indigenous Culture

I. Talking Skin: Indigenous Tattoo Traditions: Humanity Through Skin and Ink

(Princeton University Press.)

“For thousands of years, these communities have etched human experiences into skin, one powerful mark at a time. But sadly, much of that ancient ink is fading fast, along with the knowledge that surrounds it. To me, tattooing isn’t just art; it’s a vital piece of global cultural heritage.”

--Lars Krutak

I’ve always been fascinated with tattoos, ever since I was a kid and used to marvel over my Uncle Johnny’s flamboyantly decorated arms. He was a sailor in the Merchant Marines and often explained to me how every inked image reminded him of some exotic place he had sailed to: “Every picture tells a story, kid, every tattoo sings a song of my travels.” Such a romantic at heart, that Johnny. In the old days, the only folks with tattoos, at least that I knew of, were military guys and members of motorcycle clubs (as they were euphemistically called back then). But that, of course, is merely the popular culture in the West that has celebrated a kind of outlaw status for wearers of the “talking skin.” I don’t have any tattoos myself, never quite worked up the courage to go through that initiation that seemed to lead to an endless road of ink. My Métis wife has some, though, and through her I learned of far older inking cultures for whom the marking of flesh is a significant gesture that embodies a shared communal awareness of place and identity. Indigenous Tattoo Traditions: Humanity Through Skin and Ink Lars Krutak’s new book from Princeton University Press, is both a major contribution to that community of bodily markings which is greatly moving to me as a cultural commentator and a poignant reminder to me of how, in my formative years, I was intrigued by these mobile graphic artifacts, artworks that from my earliest days always felt like a kind of visual music. The songs that indigenous tattoos sing are rooted in a combination of ancestral pride and contemporary swag, and Krutak’s fine tome celebrates their singing in a truly poetic manner worthy of such a noble fusing of art and heritage.

Krutak is an anthropologist, photographer, research associate at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, and the author of several books, including Tattoo Traditions of Asia and Tattoo Traditions of Native North America. He resides in Washington, D.C. In search of inked legacies, his book is a veritable guided tour of global cultures and communities that have, from time immemorial, subscribed to the striking art of marking the body with designs that communicate through time. One element of this artful tradition is the belief that marking the skin symbolically can protect the wearer from malevolent forces, such as the South Sea island spiritual scarification practice that permits various evils to bounce off their bodies “like raindrops bouncing off a flower.” His earlier books explored in detail the inked traditions located in specific geographical zones, while this new one more broadly examines the archetypal roots of all Indigenous bodily graphics in even more depth, going far beyond mere political borders. The key to his approach is, I think, contained in the book’s subtitle. Kratuk examines how tattoos function as a form of writing that defines and structures community life and is a performative expression marking rites of passage, symbols of rank, and signs of marital and religious devotion. His book takes us far afield, from the heavily tattooed Li women of China’s Hainan Island with their elaborate facial and body tattoos to the bold indelible markings of Papua New Guinea’s Indigenous peoples, and onward into the contemporary realms of innovative cultural tattoo practitioners who are renewing the skin-marking legacy for future generations.

Aman Ipai of Buttui, Indonesia, 2007.

About the only thing that Kratuk does not touch upon (as it is outside the parameters of his cultural emphasis) is how tattoos traveled conceptually from the ritual and sacred, social and communal zones of First Nations globally to the assimilation of skin marking (largely for decorative purposes or to indicate outsider style and status as a rebel stance) all the way into Europe and the West as the artform was transmitted via sailors like my own eccentric Uncle Johnny and even biker gang members like that other outsider Johnny portrayed by Marlon Brando in The Wild One in 1953 (Q: “What are you rebelling against Johnny?” / A: “Whattaya got?”). As Kratuk clarifies his scope of study: 

What seems to be have been largely forgotten in contemporary discussions concerning the popularity of tattooing is the role that Indigenous Peoples played in the origins, art history, performance and perpetuation of this unique form of human expression. Long before tattoos became mainstream, they were deeply rooted in Indigenous traditions—used for storytelling, identity, history and even medicinal practice. Over the past thirty years of doing this research, I’ve met many elders who were the last to wear certain traditional tattoos—people who have since passed away, taking that part of history away with them.

For Kratuk, this art form has been a highly personal experience ever since he was a graduate student many decades ago at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, where, as an anthropology researcher, he casually strolled past a Gwich’in elder with three tattoos lines on her chin. Wanting to learn more, he began exploring the extensive library archives there and quickly learned that every Indigenous community in the Arctic practiced some form of tattooing. Eventually he sought and received consent from Indigenous elders and tattoo bearers to focus his Master’s thesis on marking traditions of the St. Lawrence Island Yukpik peoples. He discovered that there were more traditionally tattooed elders—all women—living on this remote Alaska volcanic island than anywhere else in the Arctic. The custom of male tattooing had mysteriously disappeared many decades beforehand and many of these women were in the eighties and nineties, including one traditional tattoo artist, Alice Yaavgaghsiq, who was 97 years of age.

Kayan elder Ado Ng, Borneo, 2011.

Konyak elder Nokging Wangnao, Nagaland, 2018.

Once he realized that this tradition was quickly disappearing across the Arctic, Kratuk also discerned that there was a similar vanishing across the Indigenous world, which lead him to expand his research to eventually include ancient mark marking trends across our entire planet: 

Indigenous tattoos embody a powerful narrative function that was fundamental in establishing both personal and collective identity, and a person’s name and place in the world. They also represented an individual like a name and transmitted aspects of a person’s being beyond their corporeal limits. In North America, the performance of Omaha women’s tattooing on the Great Plains was textual in its syntax and literally served as a form of writing. Their tattoos were rich in cosmic meaning and embodied oral historical teachings, and they also conferred life-giving and life-prolonging powers to the tattoo recipients.

What Kratuk most hopes that readers will take away from his impressively compiled book is the little known fact that Indigenous tattooing is one of the most powerful yet least understood forms of human expression and studying this tradition is a journey through that world of ancestral wisdom in a celebration of both ancient and evolving ink. One additional and industrious way he has developed to ensure that this art form is appreciated by a large Western audience probably encountering it for the first time is to host a television program for The Discover Channel network appropriately called Tattoo Hunter.

II. Thresholding Culture: Métis Music: Stories of Recognition and Resurgence

McGill/Queens University Press

"My main argument is that the stories we tell about Métis music matter: the way we talk about, write about, and think about Métis music matters, as does the way that we position it vis-à-vis other musics in Canada and beyond. Métis music, importantly, isn’t just an object: it is a way of thinking and a way of being."

--Monique Giroux

After examining the remarkable manner in which Indigenous tattooing traditions seem to embody a timeless expression of something poetically akin to visual music, I was brought into another plane of aesthetic appreciation altogether. As a vital form of physical storytelling, they feel as if we are listening with our eyes while their blue line formations echo the origins of the cultures which originated and still actively utilize maps of memory etched on skin. Talking skin, I call it. That notion came even more clearly into focus when I then encountered Monique Giroux’s major book-length monograph Métis Music: Stories of Recognition and Resurgence, from McGill-Queens University Press. I was reminded of something mysterious that my wife had told me about the vibrant fiddling spirit conveyed through Métis compositions: that their sounds seem to be boldly “tattooing silence,’ which they accomplish with an exuberant and intricate dance of sonic delights. In many ways, Métis music shares an unexpected resonance with other classical music cultures widely separated in space and time but immediately situated in an identical realm of the heart and soul. This is music which decorates silence in much the same way that visual art decorates space. And once again I was struck by the odd symmetry between considering the visual music of mark making and considering the making of marks into or onto silence. Sometimes it feels as though the complex rhythmic structures explored by some quartets are even braiding sweetgrass made of musical notes. I suspect that this is what Giroux is primarily getting at so skillfully by suggesting that Métis music isn’t just a heritage object worthy of critical study but also a way of being worthy of emotional and even spiritual reverence. Giroux holds the Canada Research Chair in Métis Music and is Associate Professor of Music in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge.

Though she teaches the musical traditions embodied in Métis heritage, in this book she takes a far from strictly academic approach to her subject. It’s personal as well as professional for Dr. Giroux, as her sharing of archival research work as a PH.D. student, and her own lived experiences as an ethnomusicologist, fiddler and dancer, make for compelling reading while she explores Métis-settler relations through the music itself and asks important critical questions about what makes music Métis, and who gets to decide. This, her first book, in addition to being a very fine one, emphasizes that Métis music, and by extension all Métis culture, are an important site of knowledge for all Canadians, for both scholarship and also for community-based personal engagement. Along the way, she demonstrates how the history of Métis music-making, from the Red River Resistance to the present, also reflects a sense of loss: the often ongoing complex dynamics of both non-recognition and erasure that Métis people continue to experience. As she explains: “Not all forms of recognition do the kind of work that Métis communities deserve and to which they are entitled as an Indigenous people, while at the same time this book shows how Métis peoples have persisted and maintained their identity, often through music, in the face of a long history of dispossession.” Most importantly, perhaps, her book contends that Métis music also reflects broader social relationships and she illustrates, with copious historical content, how a reframing of identity is both problematic and essential to maintaining a valuable heritage, especially via community gatherings focusing on fiddling and dance traditions that convey the kind of stories that can repair relationships. Her presentation offers us a unique table of contents showing communal interactions sustaining a long continuum, even an infinite one, perhaps, traveling from the past to the present and reaching out towards a hopefully fruitful future.

The cultural identifier “Métis” is most accurately applied to that distinct group in the historic community in Manitoba’s Red River Settlement (which is where my wife’s matriarch ancestral roots originated) and their encounters with both French and Scottish settlers from Europe. Over time the term came to be used, perhaps too loosely, as a mixed-ancestry personage by Indigenous peoples with a variety of settler cultures. However, it is most correctly identified with the combination of French visitors (specifically men) and the First Nations peoples (specifically women) who are a distinct Indigenous culture with a unique history, language and way of life. The Métis fiddle is the musical style motif developed by the Métis of Canada (Turtle Island) to play the violin, either solo or in folk ensembles. It is denoted by the percussive use of the bow and a percussive accompaniment, such as spoon drumming, and first originated in the post-contact era when fiddles were introduced in Manitoba by French Canadian and Scottish fur traders in the early 1800’s and adopted by the Métis into their own culture. Métis fiddling can thus can described as the incorporation of First Nations, Scottish and French rhythms, but with a distinctive and unique beat. This tradition, with important musical ties to Ojibwe stylings, is largely an oral one and is rarely if ever taught in schools, so the most effective way of learning is to engage in community festivals, children being taught be elders through example. The best way of grasping the lively energy of the music (which is often coupled with equally lively jig dancing) is as a hybrid merging of French chanson styles with Scottish jig song and Indigenous styles in which the overlapping sources have become indistinct. Métis fiddlers are often best considered as cultural ambassadors, as their pieces, handed down from elders to youth for generations, comprise an embodied kind of storytelling and history recording based on the notion of Miziksharing, or community sharing, which both informs and actively sustains the social cohesion of the culture.

With easily detectable aesthetic roots deriving from an amazing amalgam of European waltz, polka, two-step, jig and square dance, both the rhythms and accompanying dance steps intermingle with First Nations dance steps. Technically speaking, the chord progressions use complex harmonic structures which frequently abandon the customary progression of European-derived tunes, and are echoed by audience call/response hand-clapping, foot-stomping and any other available aural mode of sonic merriment. Fiddle tunes for dances have always been integral to Métis music making, which is nearly indistinguishable from the dances it fuels. One central defining tune is the historically legendary “Red River Jig” (known in Michif as Oayache Mannin), a piece that has similar signatures to those known as reels. The dancing, like the instrumental echoes inspiring it, involves complicated prominent footwork familiar to lovers of traditional Irish dance, but brought to a high level of dexterity when merged with Indigenous patterns of flowing movement. Weirdly enough, there are echoes of this footwork motif found in Scottish highland strathspeys, and even in contemporary hip-hop, where it is known as "jookin’," which emphasizes fancy footwork by focusing attention on the performers sliding and stepping movements (as per Michael Jackson, most famously). To further liberate the primal energies in this boisterous music form, some deft Métis practitioners, such as Cory Poitras for instance, combine simultaneous fiddle playing with exuberant jigging in a truly unbridled format which almost parallels jitterbug jazz in shape and tone. Giroux is herself a practitioner of both Métis fiddling and dancing, in addition to being a historian of their cultural significance in both small community jam sessions and large scale stadium-sized events. “As a fiddler and dancer,” she writes, “I was able to participate in various ways, which gave me insights into the practices and relationships embedded in these events. Specifically, I tracked how discourse around Métis music has shifted over the past century and a half, allowing me to research references to Métis music and dance from the mid-1800’s onward.”

Her informative and entertaining book also acknowledges the integral collaborative nature of the scholarship employed, which almost seems to echo the collaborative nature of the music itself. She notes in particular Dr. Suzanne Steele, who holds a post-doctoral position at Lethbridge University, as well as Jonas Weselake-George and Troy Bannerman, whose knowledge of Métis context shaped her thinking and approach, along with Dr. Michelle Porter, who helped clarify fine arts-based approaches to research dissemination and M.A. student Angela Brooks, who assisted her in the editing process. Giroux’s fervent hope is that this book will excite people about Métis music and encourage them to appreciate its many gifted and spirited musicians: “I could not have done this work if I was not surrounded by strong Métis people who are passionate about cultural continuity.” Indeed, it is precisely that commitment to a vital cultural continuum that makes Métis Music: Stories of Recognition and Resurgence such a welcome contribution to this uniquely First Nations/Canadian art form. And one thing I take away with me after engaging with these two significant books on Indigenous culture, among many others, is that Indigenous tattoos are elegant depictions of frozen music, and Métis music is an elegant tattoo inscribed on the skin of silence.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.