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

By Mairin Odle

Under the Skin investigates the role of cross-cultural body modification in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century North America, revealing that the practices of tattooing and scalping were crucial to interactions between Natives and newcomers. These permanent and painful marks could act as signs of alliance or signs of conflict, producing a complex bodily archive of cross-cultural entanglement.

Indigenous body modification practices were adopted and transformed by colonial powers, making tattooing and scalping key forms of cultural and political contestation in early America. Although these bodily practices were quite distinct—one a painful but generally voluntary sign of accomplishment and affiliation, the other a violent assault on life and identity—they were linked by growing colonial perceptions that both were crucial elements of “Nativeness.” Tracing the transformation of concepts of bodily integrity, personal and collective identities, and the sources of human difference, Under the Skin investigates both the lived physical experience and the contested metaphorical power of early American bodies.

Struggling for power on battlefields, in diplomatic gatherings, and in intellectual exchanges, Native Americans and Anglo-Americans found their physical appearances dramatically altered by their interactions with one another. Contested ideas about the nature of human and societal difference translated into altered appearances for many early Americans. In turn, scars and symbols on skin prompted an outpouring of stories as people debated the meaning of such marks. Perhaps paradoxically, individuals with culturally ambiguous or hybrid appearances prompted increasing efforts to insist on permanent bodily identity. By the late eighteenth century, ideas about the body, phenotype, and culture were increasingly articulated in concepts of race. Yet even as the interpretations assigned to inscribed flesh shifted, fascination with marked bodies remained.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781512823172

Book preview

Cover: Under the Skin by Mairin Odle

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

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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: Tattooing—United States—History—18th century. | Scalping—United States—History—18th century. | Tattooing—Social aspects—United States—History—18th century. | Scalping—Social aspects—United States—History—18th century. | Indians of North America—Social life and customs. | United States—Civilization—To 1783.

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

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

Hardcover ISBN 9781512823165

eBook ISBN 9781512823172

CONTENTS

Introduction. Stories Written on the Body

Chapter 1. Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted: Colonial Interpretations, Indigenous Tattoos

Chapter 2. The Ill Effects of It: Reading and Rewriting the Cross-Cultural Tattoo

Chapter 3. Pricing the Part: Economies of Violence and Stories of Scalps

Chapter 4. Playing Possum: Scalping Survivors and Embodied Memory

Epilogue. Narrative Legacies and Settler Appropriations

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Stories Written on the Body

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 Kanehsatà: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.¹ 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.² In 1777, he took a job as interpreter for a trade expedition north of the Great Lakes, and while stopping over in Pays Plat on Lake Superior, was offered adoption by an Ojibwe leader named Madjeckewiss (sometimes spelled Matchekewis). He accepted: Though I had not undergone this ceremony, I was not entirely ignorant of the nature of it, having been informed by other traders of the pain they endured.… I determined, however, to submit to it, lest my refusal of the honor intended me should be attributed to fear, and so render me unworthy of the esteem of those from whom I expected to derive great advantages, and with whom I had engaged to continue for a considerable time.³

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."⁴ The memoir’s somewhat oblique description leaves unclear whether the design of Long’s tattoo corresponded with his new name or even whether the process was as painful as he had anticipated. But it is clear that he regarded it as an honor. He also viewed it as an exchange, the receipt of a tangible benefit that he made return for in gifts of scalping-knives, tomahawks, vermilion and other goods to Madjeckewiss and the rest of the community.⁵

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 difference—written, oral, and visual. Such observations were often more revelations of a society’s own cultural standards than accurate depictions of the peoples they purported to describe.⁶ 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 another’s 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 mattered—and 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?

This work primarily addresses moments when the integrity of colonizing bodies (regularly conflated with the integrity of entire colonizing cultures) was disrupted by instances of these newcomers acquiring marks from Native Americans—voluntarily or violently.⁷ While the propensity of European newcomers to regard Native cultural signifiers as a set of flexible symbols to take up, repurpose, or reject at will has been well documented, the malleability of appearance could cut both ways.⁸ Indigenous customs—and in particular, intimate and painful practices that remade the body, whether by violence or by ornamentation—could be co-opted as ideological resources by colonizing societies, but Native peoples were equally attentive to the powerful messages that such marks might send.

Contests for power often took the directly forceful forms of warfare and murder: efforts to destroy bodies. Changes in appearance might be far more subtle incorporations of new symbols, new styles, and new trade goods: efforts to enhance bodies. This book explores both violence and adornment, approaching them as interrelated moments of transformation. Under the Skin focuses on the painful and permanent changes of scalping and tattooing: two practices that settler newcomers closely associated with the Indigenous societies of North America. Despite (or because of) their associations with Indigeneity, both were adopted by newcomers, who in turn assigned their own meanings to the marks, scars, and trophies produced by tattoos and scalp-taking. In a time and place where relationships between Indigenous and colonizing societies were complex and unresolved, the interplay among different cultural norms and beliefs about the human body meant that there was rarely a single, clear-cut interpretation of, say, a tattooed hand or a living but scalped individual. Indeed, there is rarely a single way to read a scar or mark today. This book, then, is about embodied experience but also the creation of narratives to explain those experiences.

The narratives considered here are accounts of personal experience, rumor-mongering, works of political propaganda, literary productions, legal and philosophical frameworks, and assertions of scientific expertise—sometimes several of these at once. They are also largely the stories of settlers in the English colonies in eastern North America and, later, settlers in territories claimed by the early American republic. These stories, to be clear, are not the only story written on the body that one might find in early America, and my purpose here in foregrounding them is not to uncritically elevate them but to study their role in the generation and perpetuation of settler logics.

By settler logics, I mean narratives emerging from colonial discourse, which delineate Native societies in such ways as to produce racialized identities and which purport to naturalize and legitimize the claims of newcomers.⁹ Within those narratives, as scholars have noted, the settler-state depends on images of indigeneity even as it eliminates indigenous subjects—but further than that, I would argue, the colonization of North America has used not only Indigenous imagery but has made complex, even contradictory, appropriations of embodied markers of Indianness right down to the level of the skin.¹⁰ These physical transformations and the stories told about them matter a great deal if we want to better understand how Anglo-American ideas of human difference developed and changed, as well as how those ideas were slotted into—or derived from—colonial attempts to assert dominance over Indigenous peoples.

In considering these settler logics, this work focuses on accounts by those who might—over the timespan covered by this book—be described as English, British, Anglo-American colonists, or, after the founding of the United States, white Americans. That so many terms uneasily and unevenly describe these similar but not interchangeable groups highlights the slipperiness of national, ethnic, or cultural identities: one of the very concerns that prompted so much scrutiny of bodily markings in early America. A focus on a single European colonial project is necessarily an incomplete picture: the North American borders of such empires tended to be paper-thin, particularly in the face of powerful Indigenous polities to whom such territories actually belonged. The borders were also porous: individuals moved across boundaries as travelers, traders, captives, and fighters, while information circulated in rumors and conversations, private letters, newspapers, translated texts, and reproduced images. My emphasis on English and colonial Anglo-American sources derives, in part, from questioning the shorthand of comparative colonialism that has asserted that British colonies were particularly resistant to adopting elements of Indigenous cultures compared to supposedly more malleable colonial societies such as New France.¹¹ Given the cultural exchange and contestation of European empires in North America, assessing that claim of British uniqueness means also looking at non-Anglophone materials and particularly, given the geographic proximity and major imperial struggles over the Northeast, French sources. I therefore occasionally use the term Euro-American to describe wider colonial American populations. A work that fully incorporated all the major colonial powers in North America and their adoption, rejection, and reinterpretation of Native body modification practices would be epic, and I have not attempted it here; however, Under the Skin does compare British and French experiences with tattooing and scalping where pertinent.

Foregrounding the narratives and bodies of Euro-Americans in this work presents ethical complexities. I am conscious that placing accounts of suffering, scarred, and transformed colonial bodies at the center of this text risks treating appearance as spectacle and, even more important, risks seeming to validate the very idea of settler victimization to which these accounts were often put. Scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have observed the preoccupation of much research with collecting the pain narratives of subaltern communities, arguing that Indigenous suffering is all too often regarded in such accounts as a marker of authenticity and as an experience requiring recognition by outsiders. This book is unavoidably about violence, about contests for power that marked both bodies and minds. But I have attempted, as Tuck and Yang put it, to turn the gaze back upon power, specifically the colonial modalities of knowing persons as bodies to be differentially counted, violated, saved, and put to work.¹² To do so means looking carefully at the stories colonial actors told about their own bodies and the bodies of Native peoples and taking them seriously—but as narratives, not facts. Colonial understandings of these bodily practices were sometimes informed by the experiences and knowledge of Native interlocutors or reflective of actual Indigenous cultural values; however, a work that explored scalping and tattooing while rooted in Indigenous perspectives and methodologies would have a very different emphasis. I have cast a wide net in researching this book, drawing on sources describing body modification within Algonquian societies of Roanoke and coastal Carolina, as well as those in what is currently New England and the Canadian Maritimes, including Wampanoag, Massachusett, Mohegan, Pequot, Narragansett, and Wabanaki peoples; Anishinaabeg peoples of the Great Lakes, including Odawa (Ottawa), Ojibwe, and Potawatomi communities; the Lenape (Delaware); the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Confederacy or Six Nations); the Shawnee; the Cherokee; and other Native nations east of the Mississippi River. This project attempts to describe some of the broad underlying meanings of tattooing and scalping as they were historically practiced among this diverse range of Native societies, while acknowledging both Indigenous communities’ right to opacity around culturally significant practices and the need for additional scholarship that considers these markings firmly within their specific cultural contexts.¹³ I have instead focused on how bodily modifications penetrated colonial skin and colonial imaginations.

---

The body conceptually links the small and large, the intimate and the systematic, the public and personal. In the Atlantic world, the human body sometimes appeared to be one of the only things newly introduced societies had in common. Indeed, perceived continuities between shared bodily metaphors enabled colonists and Native Americans to establish alliances that could be made part of the natural order through expressions of mutual humanity. But overlooked cultural specificities of bodily metaphors and experience could also create misunderstandings, while differences in physical appearance could be deployed to insist on a natural order that ranked capabilities and place in life. Variances in physiognomy could prompt a disavowal of physical similarities and lead instead to articulations of ideas about human difference rooted in the flesh. As historian Nancy Shoemaker notes, the body appeared to be a mutually intelligible language but also became the means to organize new understandings of difference.¹⁴

The history of the body as a field draws on a number of intersecting lines of inquiry, reflecting the body’s meaning as both a discursive construction (with bodies acting as signifiers and metaphors) and as a tangible object (with physical embodiment acting as a site of experience or subjectivity).¹⁵ Rather than acting as a surrogate for any one category of analysis, histories of the body that encourage an intermingled study of gender, sexuality, and race not only more accurately reflect the historical entanglement of such themes; they can productively generate more than the sum of their parts. Discursive studies of the body have been more readily undertaken than those attentive to historical embodiment, in part because of the greater number of sources addressing the body as a communicative sign system.¹⁶ However, as historian Kathleen Brown notes, Although it is saturated in culture, the body is also subject to the dictates of its own logic: that of a physical being, vulnerable to sickness and death despite human efforts at intervention and interpretation.¹⁷ It is worth noting that early America and its Atlantic circuits of exchange saw a proliferation of printed material, both textual and visual, documenting the imprint of power on the body—and clearly associating the marks on skin with forms of impression, puncturing, and engraving made on paper, clothes, and metal.¹⁸ The era’s understandings of cutaneous signs relied heavily on notions of reading the human body, and throughout this work I attempt to take seriously the notion of body as text without losing sight of those physical logics that Brown describes. Body modifications are a means of engaging both the discursive body—the body as imagined, categorized, or represented—and the material body, the practices shaping physical human experience.

The marks examined here are those that, in their literal inscription in flesh, held stories of both bodily pain and close physical proximity between individuals receiving and inflicting them.¹⁹ A sharp needle might enter the skin, or a sharp knife might lift it. As critic Elaine Scarry has noted, pain possesses a deep certainty for the individual experiencing it but might appear subjective, even ephemeral, from the outside. Nonetheless, the material fact of external damage or modification of the flesh lends cultural beliefs (such as those about social identities and hierarchies of power) a realness and certainty despite the distance between seeing pain and feeling it oneself. Scarry has noted how the infliction of pain might result in the undoing or silencing of potential communication.²⁰ My work shows that the difficulty of conveying bodily experience—the impossibility of describing sensation so that one’s listeners or readers might fully translate it into their own skin—was productive not only of frustration but also of elaboration: efforts to draw analogies, find comparisons, and focus the attention ever more closely on marked flesh.²¹

Tattooing and scalping were both permanent and painful marks: one often voluntary, the other decidedly not. Equally important, they were—in the eyes of colonial observers—both strongly associated with Native physical appearance and regarded as revealing crucial aspects of Native societies, although what those crucial elements were thought to be changed over time and encompassed a number of contradictory claims. Euro-Americans debated various questions: Were Indigenous tattoos an admirably clear-cut system of honorifics or a sign of foolish vanity? Was scalping a repulsively brutal act whose perpetrators were fundamentally uncivilized or another tactic to be added to the newcomers’ arsenal? Regardless of interpretation, on non-Native bodies both marks were thought to be clear signals of interactions with Native individuals. And among Native peoples, the meaning