Archive Note
The marks were applied by skilled female seamstresses to other women, tied to life-stage transitions and the mastery of essential skills, and were held to offer protection. Two techniques coexisted across the Arctic: skin-stitching, in which a soot-blackened sinew thread is drawn through the upper dermis with a bone needle, and hand-poke puncture. The practice is attested deep in the Arctic past, with preserved examples at the Qilakitsoq mummies in Greenland and the Cape Kiyalighaq mummy on St. Lawrence Island, and it was broken not by a ban on tattooing but by missionary suppression from the late nineteenth century and by the residential and boarding-school systems through the mid-twentieth. It did not reach zero: elders bearing traditional tattoos lived into the 2000s and were the source for the revival, which dates to roughly 2005 onward and is led by figures including Hovak Johnston, the filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, and the Greenlandic practitioner Maya Sialuk Jacobsen, who work from elder testimony, archival photographs, and collections rather than from nothing.