When she was 14 years old, Quannah Chasinghorse decided she wanted a traditional Indigenous face tattoo. The Hän Gwich’in and Oglala Lakota model—who has since, at age 19, made an impression on the fashion world after starring in Gucci campaigns and landing a Vogue Mexico cover—had grown up in Fairbanks, Alaska, seeing images of her ancestors wearing the three distinct chin lines called Yidįįłtoo. She asked her mother, Jody Potts-Joseph, if she would do the markings for her, using the traditional stick-and-poke technique to apply the ink. Though Potts-Joseph had never tattooed anyone before, she agreed. After sterilizing one of the skin-sewing needles that she normally used for hide projects, attaching it to a pen, and dipping it into a pot of gray ink, she got to work. “It was a powerful healing moment for my daughter,” says Potts-Joseph. “As I finished the tattoo, I felt that every poke provided Quannah with an immense amount of strength and power.”
A few months after doing Chasinghorse’s first tattoo, Potts-Joseph was inspired to reclaim the Yidįįłtoo for herself. She enlisted her oldest son, Izzy, who was 16 at the time, to do her own chin tattoos. As a single mom raising five children, Potts-Joseph says she and her daughter receiving their tattoos together brought the whole family closer; in a way, it allowed for a sense of healing after they had endured financial and personal hardships. “These tattoos really helped us find our strengths during a time that our family really needed it,” Potts-Joseph says. The markings were not only a proud symbol of Indigeneity, but they became a symbol of resiliency. In Alaska, an increasing number of Native women are carrying this idea forward, reclaiming the Yidįįłtoo and giving it a special new meaning.
Many Indigenous tribes around the world have distinctive traditional facial tattoos—the Māori have Tā Moko, the Inuit have Kakiniit—but Gwich’in tattoos often appear as three distinctive lines on the chin, as well as lines on the cheeks or corners of the eye. “The lines represent a rite of passage,” says Potts-Joseph. “Traditionally, a girl gets her first tattoo when they become a woman. During a girl’s first cycle, she would learn about the responsibilities of being a woman, and that’s when she would get her first traditional markings.” Lars Krutak—a tattoo anthropologist, research associate at the Museum of International Folk Art, and author of Ancient Ink: The Archaeology of Tattooing—says the Yidįįłtoo, a tradition which is at least 10,000 years old, was also used as a method of emotional healing, to display warrior status, and as a tribal identifier, too. “The width and spacing of a woman’s chin tattoos differentiated what group they came from,” he says. “There were nine Gwich’in groups in interior Alaska.”
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