Indian Boarding School Tattooing Experiences: Resistance, Power, and Control through Personal Narratives

Abstract

Tattooing in the federal Indian boarding school system was common among the female student body in the 1960s and 1970s, but the practice is not well documented. My study explores an undocumented area of boarding school history and student experiences. The tattoos most often included small initials and markings, and my analysis concludes that the meanings were mostly related to resistance. A search of the literature on Native education, focusing on boarding schools, yielded only fragments of references to tattooing, because there has been no substantive or detailed research on Indian boarding school tattoos. One brief narrative from Celia Haig-Brown (1988), however, illustrates the commonality and the dangers of tattooing. This article examines tattoos among female students who attended Indian boarding schools in the Southwest. The personal accounts of my mother's experience in tattooing at the Phoenix Indian School provide a baseline for this study.