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Nov 14, 2023

Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe member practices Indigenous tattooing

MASHPEE — Kerri Helme, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, can often be

MASHPEE — Kerri Helme, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, can often be found practicing traditional, Indigenous tattooing out of her New Bedford apartment — a cozy capsule that sits on East Beach.

A world away, Maya Sialuk Jacobsen, a traditional Inuit tattoo artist, also revives the ancient, tribal practice out of her home — an aging, worn down grocery shop in provincial Denmark.

While they've never met, both women are private researchers, teachers and lecturers in their territories. Also storytellers in their own right, Helme and Jacobsen are part of a very small group of Indigenous artists who are resuscitating the art of tribal tattooing — an ancient practice which goes back thousands of years.

Despite the effects of colonization, which essentially erased many traditions associated with tribal tattooing, Helme and Jacobsen are breathing life back into a segment of their individual cultures that was previously lost.

"It doesn't make me feel good that I’m one of the only people practicing this kind of tattooing," Helme said. "Part of the purpose of doing so is to inspire more of my people to do it as well."

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Jacobsen, who was born in Qeqertarsuaq, a town in West Greenland, feels that despite the distance between tribal nations, tattooing has the power to bring tribes, clans and Indigenous nations together. West Greenland, she said, is just one of many Inuit territories, with Inuit communities thriving in areas of Alaska and Canada.

"Tattooing is about belonging. It's tribal and has a purpose," she said. "It's not about the individual, it's about the nation. It's there where we can collectively heal."

In 2004, Helme began practicing three traditional methods of tattooing using charcoal, as well as red and yellow ochres — or oxides of iron. To avoid infection, it's imperative, she said, to use charcoal — an element that contains carbon.

"Your body isn't going to reject the carbon because it naturally has carbon in it," she said. "Carbon is the most sterile thing on earth."

The first method Helme mastered was the "stick and poke," or "hand-poking" method of tattooing, which requires charcoal and needles made from bird or deer bone.

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Cutting is another technique, where Helme uses obsidian and quartz flakes to cut lines in the skin. She then rubs in hard wood charcoal, along with sunflower seeded or hazelnut oil.

"Cutting is an easy technique, but only works when you are doing straight lines," she said. "For chin tattoos, I can do the cutting method. And for other tats I do around people's wrists, I use the cutting method."

Threading is the third option, and Helme uses deer sinew and a deer bone needle. The practice, Helme said, is the "most difficult and painful" method of the three.

"I thread it through the skin where I want the pigment to stay. And then l pull it through and out," she said.

Jacobsen also practices all three methods of tattooing, and started her cultural tattoo journey with hand poking. Academically, Jacobsen said, hand poking is also called "puncture tattooing," and is the most wide-spread Indigenous tattooing technique.

"It just makes sense. You have a point, and you put it in the skin and you insert some color of some sort," she said. "That seems to be a tattoo method that has been invented everywhere."

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Subdermal tattooing, also known as threading, is connected to Inuit communities, as well as North and South American Indigenous territories. Besides an eye needle, an awl can also be used for this technique, along with hardened sinew thread. A stick or whale splinter or hard straw are also effective tools.

"You make the hole horizontally under the skin — like a tunnel — and then you insert the stick afterwards," she said.

Jacobsen said subdermal tattooing or threading is difficult and slightly uncontrollable. When she first researched the technique, she thought the practice was logically rooted to traditional Inuit sewing practices.

"Inuit women are the best seamstresses in the world. We start sewing when we are like 2-years-old," she said. "All the little spirits in the finger tips are woken up by making little knots. I grew up like that. Everybody grows up like that."

But through research, she soon found South American tribal communities conducting subdermal tattooing — including in Brazil's Amazon region. While she can't speak for those tribes, she said there are mythological reasons why Inuit women tattoo in this way.

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"There are esoteric reasons for it. Connections to religion, myths, taboos around sewing and sinew threads," she said. "It's empowering the spiritual affect of the tattoo — which is already quite strong."

Jacobsen also uses carbon and pulls from soot in its dry form. The accompanying liquid materials she uses, which she didn't name, go under the skin and have spiritual or medicinal properties she said.

"We are still trying to understand what a lot of these (liquid properties) are," she said.

Throughout the globe, thousands of styles of tattoos exist — adapted from centuries of artistic ability and historical legacies.

For most Indigenous communities, though, lies a legacy of loss — a significant gap in cultural heritage, interrupted by colonial explorers and European settlers, who often stripped Native people away from their traditional practices and ways of life.

The erasure of Wampanoag tattooing practices began with European contact, said Helme, in the late 1500s, and as colonists expanded settlements in the early 1600s.

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For 20 years, Helme worked as an interpreter, curator, foodways manager, and women's technical advisor, for entities like Plimoth Patuxet (formerly Plimoth Plantation), as well as at the University of Massachusetts Boston as a cultural resource monitor in the archeological department.

Through ongoing archeological research, Helme found documented texts, written by European settlers, that described Algonquin or Eastern Woodland tattoo practices.

Helme also stumbled across illustrations created by British painter John White in 1585, which detailed tribal tattoo practices in regions surrounding Maryland, Virginia and Delaware. The drawings depicted black-colored tattoos that were administered using charcoal.

"The John White illustrations beautifully detailed the tattoo work in the Chesapeake region," she said. "There were also quite a few French period sources that talk about and document Algonquin-style tattooing."

Accompanying explanations showed Helme's ancestors received tattoos in the 15th, 16th and 17th century as a reaction to a dream or as a way to demonstrate the community or clan they belonged to.

"Animal designs are derived when someone is showcasing what family clan they belong to — it's usually when you visit another community to attract potential suiters so they would know what clan they are from," she said.

Throughout her archeological research, Helme also volunteered during Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or NAGPRA efforts and spent thousands of hours pouring over archaeological field notes and examined ancient Indigenous pottery shards. Many of the tattoo designs she uses today were influenced by 1,000-year-old pottery patterns.

"I take designs off surviving baskets also — or from painted deerskin designs," she said.

Mostly her clients choose designs infused with a series of lines and dots. In the Wampanoag culture, Helme said, dots represent individual people.

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"One design you might see painted on our skirts is an oval shape with dots inside — and that's actually a boat with people in it," she said. "A design with a squiggly line with dots on either side represents people walking the path of life."

Throughout her findings, Helme also uncovered certain rules varying tribal communities should adhere to when they are giving or receiving tattoos. These unique guidelines can also vary from clan-to-clan and nation-to-nation, she said.

"I’ve done a lot of chin tattoos on younger women here, but in the North West, you can't get your chin tattooed until you became a grandmother," she said.

As she entered her high school years, Jacobsen's family moved to Denmark to pursue higher education for Jacobsen and her siblings. Commercial tattooing became an outlet of escape for Jacobsen, who said she always felt out of place in Denmark. Although light skinned, Jacobsen said she had Indigenous features, and "super black hair," and was "clearly a mixed child of two different races."

"That was not so easy," she said. "There is a lot of racism towards Greenlandic people in Denmark."

Commercial tattooing took her to Iceland, followed by Holland.

"It was quite nice, because, first of all, I could choose my own skin color and second — no one gave a hoot where I came from," she said. "I found that tattooing is a bunch of people from all over the world that speak the same language."

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Along the way, Jacobsen met several Indigenous women, who were conducting ancestral tattooing.

"They were rocking it and that kind of felt like a big wow for me," she said. "That was the beginning of me stepping out of the commercial tattooing world."

After undergoing shoulder surgery, she began to read about Inuit tattooing traditions, and she never looked back.

"I wasn't able to pick up the machines again after the surgery and I also didn't want to," she said. "I knew I was tapping into things that were meaningful."

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Like Helme, Jacobsen found herself engrossed in books, articles and reading materials. She gorged herself with archaeological research and eventually began creating replicas of tools that were once used by tribal tattoo artists.

"With the tools, I began to understand the access to material, the connection with material," she said.

While the path towards discovery was difficult for both Jacobsen and Helme, photographs helped pave the way for Jacobsen. Because Dutch, Danish and British colonists didn't populate Greenlandic and other Inuit communities until about 1721, photography was eventually a tool settlers used to document tribal people. Jacobsen also has access to paintings and written descriptions.

Inuit tribal nations still hold "enormous cultural anchorage," said Jacobsen. She called the Danish form of colonization a "protective one," and said Inuit territories were widespread, yet preserved in areas where "the Danes could make money" off Inuit nations. Even the Greenlandic Inuit language, called "Kalaallisut" was preserved.

"We are lucky to be one of the most researched and described people in the world. Which means that there is a staggering amount of material about us," she said.

As Jacobsen continues to bring ancestral tattoos back to her people, she said she often calls on "Sassuma Arnaa," or "the women of the depth" to clear the way towards generational healing.

"I know when I tattoo those lines on the women, I take them into the knowledge of religion, culture, language and the spirit of the ocean," she said. "There's intention in who these lines are for."

Helme often finds herself overwhelmed by the vast amount of Wampanoag culture and knowledge that has been wiped out in the last 400 years. But she grounds herself through her archaeological work and traditional practices her nation has managed to hang onto.

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Tattooing also helps bring her closer to the ancestors as she takes comfort in understanding their world view.

"I feel like my whole life has been a struggle to understand how my ancestors viewed the world," she said. "I think the best way to understand that is by eating the food they were eating. Singing the songs they were singing. Really walking in their footsteps."

Contact Rachael Devaney at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter: @RachaelDevaney.

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