Embodying Violence

The Oceanic cultural tattoo has a myriad of pasts, presents and futures that constitute a sense of cultural identity. In engaging with its history, recognising the coterminous relationship between colonialism and missionisation is imperative to understanding the levels of trauma and violence that impacted many Indigenous Oceanians over the last few centuries. I situate violence as an infection whose side effects are experienced through historical and (inter)generational trauma.^[2] Across Oceania, violence has seeped into Oceanic cultures through indoctrination of Western values over Indigenous Oceanic values. Embedding a new religion, Western political laws, and social ostracization among Indigenous communities has effectively silenced Indigenous Oceanic tattooing practices. Tattooed Indigenous women were pushed into conforming to Western gender roles and their voices about this history were silenced, as they were considered grotesque, uncivil and unfeminine. The sounds of tattooing chants, tools that rhythmically tapped the cultural marks into physical existence, and tattooing histories were stifled within cultural circles to make way for those of a Western history. Western indoctrination, in the form of colonisation and Christianity, seeped like contagions into the minds of Indigenous cultures, altering approaches to Indigenous knowledge systems and ways of thinking. The violence visited onto tattooing cultures drastically infected their sociocultural aspects within Indigenous societies.

This paper focuses on these imbricated themes to explore the types of colonial violence and the historical and generational trauma forced onto the Indigenous Oceanic female body across different Oceanic cultures. My claim here is that the release of colonial identity is marked through the blood shed during a cultural tattooing ceremony and the invocation of the Indigenous tattoo identity is embodied through the visual representation of the tattoo on the skin. I contrast the differences between Western epistemologies of tattoo practices, using Indigenous knowledge systems to explore the intricate concepts of tattoo cultures. Considering the layers of colonial violence that has infected Indigenous foundations of tattoo praxis, it is also imperative to note that generalising some of the examples of Oceanian tattoo cultures is not to homogenise Indigenous tattoo practices, but to respect that each culture contains significantly closed and sacred knowledges that ought to remain within those specific cultural spaces.

Historical Accounts

Western laws that were established in Oceania from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century removed Oceanian cultural practices to make way for a hierarchy that was more advantageous to Westerners. Tattoo art was one of the cultural practices that suffered. With the implementation of political laws and conversion of strong Indigenous political leaders, most colonial reforms found their way into cultural aspects surrounding the tattoo, thereby changing them. Alongside colonialism, Christianity helped formulate these rules and laws, and social ostracisation, the division between who was and was not tattooed, became prominent among many Indigenous people. Colonial reforms also created gender constructs that placed Indigenous women into an Oceanic backdrop that served the Western gaze through exotic lenses. The following are just four examples of colonial reformation that took place across Oceania.

Tonga

In 1838–39 Tonga, King George Tupou I converted to Christianity. Following his conversion, laws were devised to implement Christian, Western ways, one of which was the tattoo ban under the Vava’u Code decreed in 1839.^[3] Many Tongans were convinced that tattoo was not a historical Tongan practice, often attributing origins to tattooing to Samoa. Other Tongans believed that the tattooists were based in Samoa, and that Tongans had travelled to Samoa to receive their tattoos, until Samoa also implemented a tattoo ban in the 1860s. The silencing of Tongan tattoo culture spread across the nation, through generations and time. Tongan tattoo revival for men has come a long way since then: Su’a Sulu’ape Paulo II and Su’a Suluape Toetu’u Aisea revived the Tongan tatatau, and Su’a Sulu’ape Aisea has now become the central authority of the Tongan tatatau practice.^[4] His work and knowledge on Tongan tattoo practices have spread across a postcolonial Oceania, a constant reminder that knowledge holders of such practices are tasked with the duty to share and (re)educate Oceanian cultures. Su’a Suluape Aisea shares his knowledge of proper cultural protocols for the implementation of the reawakening of this tattoo practice.

Fiji

Like the Tongans, the political turmoil among Fijians also led to the swift conversion to Christianity and colonial takeover. Fijian chief Cakabau converted to Christianity and much of Fiji followed.^[5] By the late 1880s, tattooing had been silenced, and the Christian way of life led to the social ostracising of women who were already tattooed. Tattooing in Fiji is a woman’s prerogative, while much of its history of tattoo has been written by colonial men writing about Fijian women. Tattooed Fijian women were not welcomed at social or public gatherings and were shunned by their non-tattooed peers. This social discrimination forced the tattoo practice to dwindle into a rumour. Many Fijians have been unaware that tattooing was a woman’s prerogative, and because of the social ostracisation, tattooing was hushed into a aboo topic. These silenced voices began to return when the Veiqia Project reawakened the qia, the Fijian tattoo, in 2015. The project has conducted extensive research into the history of Fijian tattoo, which was heavily influenced by colonialism and Christianity.^[6] The Veiqia Project was pioneered by seven Fijian women— Margaret Aull, Donita Hulme, Joana Monolagi, Dulcie Stewart, Luisa Tora, Tarisi Sorovi-Vunidilo and Ema Tavola. The primary objective of the Veiqia Project is to create a visual identifying marker for Fijian women to associate with their culture.

Aotearoa, New Zealand

In addition to silencing tattoo cultures through colonialism and Christianity, Aotearoa New Zealand’s tattoo practice was also affected by the Tohunga Suppression Act in 1907.^[7] This act stated that any tohunga, skilled practitioner, or Māori knowledge holder, which included the tohunga ta moko, the tattoo master, were not allowed to engage in any cultural practices that would contribute to the gathering of Māori communities. Ngahuia Te Awekotuku has pointed out that the Tohunga Suppression Act was not a direct attack on tattooing culture in Aotearoa, but aimed to suppress Māori culture as a whole.^[8] Western academia claimed that Māori methods were detrimental to Māori life, and that practices such as tattooing exacerbated medical problems. Overall, the art of tattooing declined within Aotearoa New Zealand because of politics, economics and social discrimination. The decline in moko practices were impacted differently across genders. Michael King notes that although facial tattooing of the male Māori had declined or was no longer well recorded in practice after 1865, the facial tattooing of the female Māori continued into the twentieth century.^[9] This visual erasure of moko practice gave rise the false assumption that the tattoo practice was, as King wondered at the time, “something extinct”. Since the decline of the practice, moko has returned and has been flourishing in recent years, proving the assumptions of ethnographers like Horatio Robley and Elsdon Best wrong.^[10]

Tahiti

Another act of attempting to stop tattooing practices is witnessed in Tahiti. Makiko Kuwahara notes that three legal codes were put into place: the Pomare Code (1819), which labelled anyone who used the tattooing tools as “evil people”; the Tamatoa Code (1820), which punished those Tahitians who marked their bodies with labour; and the Huahine Code (1822), which demanded the absolute removal of tattooing.^[11] Tattooing in Tahiti resumed in the early 1980s, however, tattooing with cultural tools was banned for reasons of “hygiene” in 1986.^[12] Tattooing in Tahiti has faced waves of discrimination, where the marked body has been used by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to visually represent a sociopolitical action. Despite the advent of Christianity and its hold over Tahitians over the years, the reawakening of the Tahitian tattoo has been attributed to the South Pacific Festival of the arts in 1992, hosted in Tahiti. John Utanga and Therese Mangos noted that prior to 1992 tattooing was frowned upon, and its contemporary use was notably among those in prisons with little regard given to the sociocultural significances of the cultural practice.^[13] These echoed colonial ideas that had established that what was inherently Indigenous became synonymous with negativity, being associated with criminals and savages, seen as violent, unintelligent and uncivil. The accepted idea of them mainly being Indigenous was what served Westerners as a surplus value, and cultural aspects of the tattoo served no such value.

Tattooed Dusky Maidens

Indigenous Oceanic women’s bodies have been heavily stereotyped by colonialism. Visual imagery of Oceanic women depicted her as a bare-breasted maiden against tropical and edenic backdrops of beaches and mountains.^[14] One of the tropes that developed from such visual representations is that of the dusky maiden: an overtly over-sexualised and erotised depiction. Such images of tattooed Oceanic women presented them as an icon of savagery for Westerners, with the tattoos portraying them negatively, separating them from their cultural contexts, through a Western lens.

Oceanic women were conveyed with two distinct narratives: the first comprises the anonymous imaging of their bodies, recorded without names or photographed without permissions; the second is the complete ignoring of their lived experiences. The erasure of their narratives from the tropes and Western imaginings erases their ancestries and leaves future generations disconnected. The dissociation between the tattooed women in a Western portrayal and the real tattooed woman becomes apparent; Indigenous Oceanic women as exoticised icons are divorced from the pain and oppressions inflected upon them. The tattooed woman is removed from the sociopolitical structures of a culturally integrated Western/European way, but remains an artistic aesthetic in the realm of imagery. This alone creates a divide for the Oceanic women whose tattoos invoke these ancestral histories and access to the Indigenous identity.

Within the contemporary, those who have come to know their tattoo histories in a negative light are re-learning the importance of the cultural marks carried within their social structures. Oceanic women who once carried these oral histories fall into historical peripheries. Women’s tattooed bodies were subjected further to overtly exoticised tropes that degraded the Indigenous body. From the normalisation of bare-breasted sexualised portraits, the lack of information about anaonymous tattooed women, to the commercialisation and cultural appropriation of these tattoos, the violence of colonial settlers and their history clearly infected the sociocultural exchange between Westerners and Indigenous women.

Women’s histories became recorded under the violent lens of the colonial gaze, adding to the dusky maiden trope. A famous historical example is that of the Tahitian Queen Purea, whose misnomer is “Oberea”. Joseph Banks and Purea had a sexual relationship during Banks’s time in Tahiti and Purea was mentioned in several texts by Banks and Captain James Cook. Her popularity among the English was due to the fictional stories created to portray her as a lewd character; she was featured in spoof epistles that depicted her tattoos and personality as vulgar and unbecoming of a “queen”. In the pantomime A Trip Around the World, she was cast as the antagonistic sorceress who sought to destroy Britain’s chosen Tahitian emissary Mai.^[15] In the spoofs, Purea is said to have bewitched good British men with her “painted bum to view”, causing these men to “search for wonders on an Indian’s a—”.^[16]

In the pantomime, Purea’s character constantly flashes her marked bottom as a caricature to entice laughter from the audience.^[17] Greg Dening has pointed out that Purea “entered the English imagination not as something other but as something familiar in an argument about morality and corruption.”^[18] Her tattooed bottom signalled a deeper political significance in that as an Oceanic queen, her tattoos reduced her to a savage as proposed by Western hegemonic cultural values. Mikhail Bakhtin argues that laughter “has a deep philosophical meaning” and that “it can refer only to individual and individually typical phenomena of social life.”^[19] This suggests the laughter generated by the British audience is at “the absurdity of the idea that savages could be ‘queens’.”^[20] If a queen of Purea’s stature was ridiculed and subjected to this sort of discrimination, then the same violent trope bestowed onto tattooed women opened a generational and historical haunting, defacing the indelible mark of the tattoo. Colonisation’s legacy on tattoo culture plagues the Indigenous female body and their cultural tattoos, disconnecting the Indigenous value of these tattoos and replacing them with Western notions.

(Inter)generational Trauma

The skin’s role in tattoo cultures is one that Didier Anzieu theorised as the “skin-ego”, establishing that the skin contains an “outer” and “inner” section. The inner skin contains the psyche of a person; it creates the ego. The outer skin, he suggests, serves as the visible marker of one’s inner self. Alfred Gell connected Didier’s skin-ego to Polynesian tattooing, using Didier’s eight key functions. These functions are: (1) Maintenance, (2) Containment, (3) Protection, (4) Individuating, (5) Intersensory, (6) Supporting Sexual Excitation, (7) Libidinal Recharging, and (8) Registration.^[21] Here, I focus on Containment, Protection, and Individuating as parts of the skin-ego that co-relate to the traumas inflicted onto Indigenous bodies. The marks on the skin functions as the first signal to various perceptions: the skin acts as an envelope that keeps the body it encases in these perceived conditions.

Gell suggests that the tattoo turns the skin into a container, one that “communicates and at the same time conceals that which is contained.”^[22] He emphasises tattooing as a protective shield, which when placed onto the skin, acts as a “character armour”.^[23] Individuating recognises the self and the person’s unique identity. In understanding Gell’s association of tattoos to Didier’s skin-ego, it is easier to see that the skin retains information, memory, and that in losing the body’s protective quality or the armour that visually relays self-identity, it is possible to recognise how the historical violences on tattoo cultures infected the Indigenous body.

In his paper “Tatauing the Post-colonial Body”, Albert Wendt invokes the liminal aspect of tattaoos when he famously describes the phenomenon of the inner skin, the vā:

The space between, the betweenness, not empty space, not space that separates but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-that-is-All, the space that is context, giving meaning to things. The meanings change as the relationships/ contexts change.^[24]

Wendt explores the Samoan tatau as an item of clothing akin to a second skin, covering the body. He describes the tatau as having existed in the vā, where it is in this space that connections to many sociocultural aspects endure. The relationships established through tattoo concatenate the spiritual “unseen” realms to the physical real expressed through the skin. In recognising the tattoo as existing beneath the skin, existing in the vā, it links Anzieu and Gell’s theories of the skin being a container, one that contains the tattoo.

It is the master tattoo practitioner who is charged with the sacred duty to mediate the tattoo, reaching into the vā, the inner skin, physically revealing the tattoo as a visual marker on the outer skin. Their practice bonds the body that it marks to the cultural identities invoked during a tattoo ceremony. Colonisation and missionisation have severed this sacred bond between the Indigenous body and the connections to various sociocultural aspects. These violences inflicted Western gender norms onto Indigenous societies, leaving Indigenous women and their tattoo narratives outside of the scope of existence.

Cultural (Dis)Connects: Rotuma

On the island of Rotuma, both men and women were traditionally tattooed equally, with visual representations showing markings on women similar to those of men. However, the island has been under Fijian adminstration since 1881, and the concept of Rotuma’s cultural tattoo slowly phased out of practice as more Western influences became prominent with British contact. The many Westerners who witnessed Rotumans wearing the fạ’i (tattoo) commented on the various environmental inspirations that marked Rotumans’ bodies. However, since there has been a separation of genders upon Western contact, it has become apparent that the men who wrote of tattooing in the Rotuman culture were privy to the customs of men and not necessarily those of women.

Alan Howard listed a chronological account of Rotuman tattooing, dating back to Edward Edwards, captain of the HMS Pandora of 1791. The men on Edwards’s ship also had comments regarding Rotuman fạ’i, likening the marks to “moving landscapes”.^[25] Unfortunately, the practice itself fell into dormancy: missionisation played a significant role on Rotuma’s cultural practices, but it is not clearly stated that the decline of tattooing on Rotuma is a direct effect of missions being established.^[26] Through the separation from a cultural practice such as the fạ’i, Rotumans are disconnected from the visual marker and its significance became invisible. Many Rotumans within the diaspora are often searching for this connection to their homelands, and learning the language to (re)embody Rotuman culture has gathered pace.

The Rotuman fạ’i projects the visual possibilities to rediscovering and creating an indelible identity. But because of the divide from Rotuman customs and culture, often dictated by Western norms and the lack of information provided on the existence of a tattooing praxis, Rotumans, like so many other Oceanic cultures, have been taught to believe that the tattoo belongs to an ancient past. Rotumans are debased from their tattoo culture and this forms a generational divide. Trauma lingers beneath the skin in the form of colonial identity, within the body, where it is contained. In seeing this through the metaphor that violence is an infection, this lingering colonial identity depletes the important Indigenous mana of a person.

The term mana has carried many definitions since anthropological attention noticed the use of it within Indigenous societies and structures. In many Oceanic contexts, mana is a divine power that emanates from a spiritual and soulful reservoir, from where strength and power fuels one’s everyday experiences and decisions.^[27] Tainted and infected mana depletes one’s concept of cultural identity and begins to collect trauma in the form of misidentification. Numbness and generational amnesia of the tattoo distort Indigenous identities from their mana. Indigenous Oceanic people carry this trauma in their collective memory. In his introduction to Critical Trauma, Maurice Stevens states that the “memory” exists continually, inscribed in the ongoing production of a narrativized self or community of practice or affiliation.”^[28] He further connects memory to history suggesting that history itself is often “haunted by stories that have gone unincluded in the realm of the historiography ‘trauma narratives’ require.”^[29]

In the colonial erasure and negative narratives surrounding tattoos, and the indoctrination of its significances from Western perspectives, trauma infects Indigenous societies to the point that a cultural tattoo being mentioned is often dismissed as a thing of the past. Returning to tattoo culture and practices releases this trauma and colonial identities. Rushmi Jamil points out that generational trauma invokes feelings of “loss, shame, powerlessness and subordination; loss of cultural identities.”^[30] Against this background, the tattoo becomes a sort of cure to the infection. Reawakening the cultural practices of tattooing is a means of releasing the colonial identity through the bloodshed inflicted during a tattooing ceremony, and an embodiment of cultural identity is expressed through the physical representations of the tattoo on the skin. In gaining a tattoo, the Indigenous Oceanic body sheds its colonial identity, and with it the violence it has been infected with and historical traumas that resulted from it. These traumas come about from the erasure of Oceanic history, and by extension, the erasure of the cultural tattoos.

Conclusions

Violence introduced through colonialism and Christianity led to current Indigenous Oceanic generations embodying the differences between Western and Indigenous Oceanic ideologies, which includes the lack of understanding of female tattooing practices. Cultures that utilised the body as a means of expression of identities have been severed from their original purposes and are caught between the concept of forming new identities to accommodate for the infectious violences. From the indoctrination and established hegemony of Western laws and values, to the disconnections created between the value of the cultural tattoo and that of the Indigenous body and the need to regain a cultural identitiy, many nuanced themes become relational to one another. The embodiment of the infectious violences that have accumulated within the Indigenous body can often be cured through the (re)(a)wakening of the suppressed dormant praxis itself. Returning the visual cultural marker to Indigenous skins is also returning the cultural identities they were associated with before. If colonialism took centuries, then what remains is the effects of its violences. To undo generations of this violence is to first find a remedy that appeases inner turmoil. Indigenous cultures are finding this trajectory through cultural tattoo and therefore are embodying this peace. The release of colonial identities through returning the cultural tattoo to Indigenous skins is paramount to the healing of communities and the undoing of the (inter)generational trauma that lingers within the body.