How old were you when you got your first tattoo? I’m trying to carry that part of our culture on as well, and starting from the ground up, because there’s not a lot of information out there. I give people varying lengths of info on the practice, and why I have the markings that I do. How do you feel about people asking about your tattoos? Are you open to sharing the stories and meaning behind your tattoos, or do you feel like that’s private? You also see design elements that occur in nature: lightning, animals, the larger cats in the area, cat whiskers the bear claws that our men might have worn into battle-they believe they took the characteristics of those animals into battle.ĭefinitely traditional designs that are applied to the body-borrowed designs, like the pottery designs or basket designs. These can serve as a reminder of the right way. The true designs we see our ancestors depicted wearing include deltoid points, like projectiles, spearheads, and arrow points. What are some popular traditional tattoos that you see? I suppose that’s kind of left up to individual discretion nowadays. He tattooed Tyra Maney’s fingers (pictured below photo by Kristy Herron) and I had a band applied to my leg, similar to some of the ones you can see in the iconography from the Mississepean period.ĭo you consider tattooing a sacred practice? He fashioned a needle from copper conduit. He came down and gave a demonstration of the process. I worked with him in Colonial Williamsburg. His grandfather went to school with my grandfather. He’s from the Pamunkey nation basically the descendants of Powatan and Pocahontas. Warren Taylor from Williamsburg, VA, give a tattooing demonstration at the museum. That ochre is basically like an oxidation from iron ore deposits in the ground. Cherokee, North Carolina, is a very mineral rich area. The red would be iron ochre, most likely. The ink would have been charred river birch, and it’s a natural astringent. I’ve heard locust thorns might have been used, and they would have been oiled a number of times, because they’re a natural irritant. How were traditional tattoos created and applied to the body? Those markings would be like a stack of ribbons, in a military sense. This also applied to the hair style worn, and the studding of our lobes as a status indicator. The way we earned our markings as men was in a wartime scenario. But I believe the tattoos may have a language that was beyond communal bounds. You can see that in different cultures, but for us, (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians), there aren’t very many images from the historic period showing natives with tattoos. We talked to Mike Crowe (shown above), one of the Atsila Anotasgi Cultural Specialists at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, to find out more about traditional tattoos and practices of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.Ĭan you tell me about the traditional tattoos and practices of the Cherokee?Īpplying marks to our bodies that means something is universal in the world. However, there is not a lot of documentation about these customs. Tattoos were also used during ceremonies. A Conversation with Mike Crowe from the Museum of the Cherokee Indianīefore the development of the Cherokee written language, tattoos were used to identify one another in historic societies, and were especially prevalent among warriors, who had to earn their marks.
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