Archive Note
Maya Sialuk Jacobsen, from Qeqertarsuaq in Greenland, is a Kalaallit tattooer and researcher who founded the Inuit Tattoo Traditions project in 2010, focused on Greenland-side documentation and on training other Inuit women in skin-stitching and hand-poke technique. She performed the first full chin tattoo on a Greenlandic Inuk woman in roughly two hundred and fifty years, recovering a practice that missionary suppression and the residential and boarding-school systems had driven to the edge of extinction. She has trained others, including Holly Nordlum, and collaborates with the Anchorage Museum and the Greenland National Museum, and she is active in Danish-policy advocacy on facial tattoos. She is not to be confused with Maria Jacobsen, the Armenian Genocide humanitarian.