“About ten years ago, my mom and I wanted to get a tattoo. I wanted to get a traditional tattoo; my great grandmother had some. So I started researching traditional tattooing. I started talking to other artists and eventually contacted a tattoo anthropologist. As I learned more about traditional Inuit tattooing, I learned that it was for women, by women mostly. Men that had them were usually leaders or shamans. But women wore them proudly. They became a marker of a woman’s life, as she hit puberty, as she had children, gained skills, and became older. It was really a women’s thing to celebrate women’s lives.
Steven Blanchett was living in Copenhagen, and when he moved back, he told me he had met an Inuit woman from Greenland who was doing traditional hand tattooing full time. I was like ‘Hook me up!’ Her name is Maya Sialuk Jacobsen. We started Facebook chatting, like every night for six months. Then the Polar Lab from the Anchorage Museum brought her here last year, and we got to meet! When we met, it was like I had known her my whole life. We are now working on a project together through the Polar Lab to revitalize traditional Inuit tattooing techniques. While she was here, we did a lot of planning, and she will be here in October to do a three-week intensive training with myself and three other women. We are also working on a film that goes along with our project. We received a Sundance Fellowship to work on the film, and it’s taking our project to a whole other level. The whole crew is Alaskan too!
We are also working on a show that will be going up at Middle Way Café. We are taking contemporary photos and tattooing them with pen and ink. They are turning out really cool. I think it will be a fun way to educate people about traditional Inuit tattooing. The show opens up on the 14th of October.” — Holly Nordlum is Inupiaq and lives in Anchorage, Alaska.
