Mairin Odle - Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

Series editors: Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

UNDER THE SKIN

Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America

Mairin Odle

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Research in this volume was funded by the Society of Colonial Wars Fellowship in Memory of Kenneth R. LaVoy Jr.

Copyright 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10987654321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Odle, Mairin, author.

Title: Under the skin : tattoos, scalps, and the contested language of bodies in early America / Mairin Odle.

Other titles: Early American studies.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022] | Series: Early American studies | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022007570 | ISBN 9781512823165 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: TattooingUnited StatesHistory18th century. | ScalpingUnited StatesHistory18th century. | TattooingSocial aspectsUnited StatesHistory18th century. | ScalpingSocial aspectsUnited StatesHistory18th century. | Indians of North AmericaSocial life and customs. | United StatesCivilizationTo 1783.

Classification: LCC GT2346.U6 O46 2022 | DDC 391.6/5097309033dc23/eng/20220304

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007570

Hardcover ISBN 9781512823165

eBook ISBN 9781512823172

John Long, a trader, interpreter, and occasional scout for British forces, proudly claimed in his 1791 Voyages and Travels an expert familiarity with Native societies, particularly the Mohawk town of Kanehsat:ke, near Montreal, and the Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) communities north of the Great Lakes. Having quitted the regiment to enjoy my favorite Indian life, Long wrote, he traveled to join the Mohawk village on the shores of Lake of Two Mountains, carrying a scalp as a trophy of my services. Although he explained, for unfamiliar readers, that scalping was a mode of torture peculiar to the Indians and that while usually fatal, death does not always ensue, Long neither accounted for where (or whom) the scalp had come from nor indicated any particular concern in justifying his possession of it. While scalping could prompt heated accusations and violent recriminations from both Americans and Britons, the relatively casual mention by Long also demonstrates how deeply embedded the practice had become in Anglo-American imaginations and military procedure.

In his memoirs, Long asserted that his cultural fluency with Native languages and practices extended into an embodied transformation: If accidentally a stranger came among us (unless I chose to be noticed), no one could distinguish me from the Indians. Presuming on my appearing exactly like a savage, I occasionally went down in a canoe to Montreal, and frequently passed the posts as an Indian.

The pain to which Long referred was a tattooing that took place over several days. He described the procedure in a detached, third-person voice, explaining that an artist used gunpowder mixed with water to draw a design on the person to be adopted after which, with ten needles dipped in vermilion, and fixed in a small wooden frame, he pricks the delineated parts, and where the bolder outlines occur he incises the flesh with a gun-flint. The resulting tattoo would be red and blue, a result of the gunpowder and vermilion pigments. When the tattoo was complete, Long wrote, they give the party a name; that which they allotted to me, was Amik, or Beaver.

Long may have been unusual, but he was not alone. Many others in early America had physical appearances that had been altered as a result of interactions with new and unfamiliar people. Such individuals found their marked flesh the focus of reactions ranging from curiosity or sympathy to suspicion or even revulsion. Whether tortured or ornamented, violently or intimately marked, these early American bodies were rich and troubling archives of human experience. Others used the symbolism associated with such marks, and such marked bodies, for their own military, political, or cultural purposes. Across seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America, contests for power took tangible effect on the bodies of newcomers and Natives alike, and that corporeal evidence was closely scrutinized.

The colliding cultures of early America paid close attention to the unfamiliar appearances of strangers: they needed to. Failure to understand the intentions and alliances of other people could be deadly, or at the very least a missed opportunity for trade, cooperation, or alliance. Atlantic communities therefore produced elaborate descriptions of bodily differencewritten, oral, and visual. Such observations were often more revelations of a societys own cultural standards than accurate depictions of the peoples they purported to describe. But what happened when observation was taken a step further and individuals altered their own or others bodies? Attempts to decode the exteriors of others could, and often did, develop into efforts to change that exterior. As part of their contests for power, colonial and Indigenous societies made many attempts to transform one anothers appearance: changing clothes, cutting hair, piercing or stretching ears (or removing earrings), and applying (or removing) paint and makeup, as well as deploying a range of violent acts that maimed, mutilated, or marked both the dead and the living. The enslaved might be branded, war captives might have finger joints removed, and those punished for crimes might have ears or noses cropped. There were other marks, less consciously crafted by human hands yet still legible: scars and blindness from smallpox, rotting noses from syphilis. These traces on the body could prompt panic and hostility, or curiosity and research, or desire, mockery, or wonder. Most notably, they prompted new stories about which types of difference matteredand how to create, or erase, those differences.

In an Atlantic world of competing empires, colonies, and societies, how bodies were treated was integral to the articulation of imperial ideologies, even as individual bodies marked moments of resistance and self-fashioning. Studying the marks of collective and personal experience on early American bodies makes visible to us a world of signs that could indicate affiliation, alienation, conflict, and commodification. In a world characterized by increasing long-distance travel, imperial expansion, and the circulation of stories about and images of strange people and places, crucial questions existed: Who are you? What are your allegiances? And what does your appearance tell us, not just about you but about the people you have met and the places you have been?