ANCIENT PRACTICE
Tattooing traditional coastal artwork.
Kwiaahwah Jones pulls down the back of her Tshirt to expose a small black map of Haida Gwaii tattooed along her spine.
The curator of the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art in Vancouver says she was 18 when she got the tattoo and hasn’t received any more since. “I wanted to know exactly what I wanted. I didn’t want anything frivolous.”
Today, at 30, Jones is finally ready for her next tattoo. This time she has put more consideration into it.
She sits at her office computer and calls up several images of tattoos she has created, including one depicting a halibut that she plans to get inked on her left thigh this summer.
Tattooing may not be known as traditional coastal artwork, but it goes back generations among ancient coastal peoples. Jones says the practice among the Haida faded out a century or so ago with the arrival of missionaries who frowned on the practice.
The generation of her greatgrandparents would have been the last to receive traditional tattoos, which formed part of the potlatch, banned by the Canadian government in 1885.
The Haida responded to the law by putting their lineages on jewelry such as bracelets as precious metals became available, Jones says.
“The practice transformed. You could remove them. It was a way to continue the practice and identify your social lineage, the social function of who you are.”
Her own forthcoming tattoo is part of a renaissance sweeping Haida Gwaii and the Kwakwaka’wakw community of Alert Bay on northeastern Vancouver Island. “Haida are reclaiming and feeling out our identity and bringing back tattoos is part of that,” she explains.
Just as remarkable is the fact that a white man — Bart Willis, an Alberta-born tattoo artist now based in Austin, Texas — is at the centre of this cultural reawakening. “It’s like an invisible hand has been guiding me,” the 47-year-old owner of Southside Tattoo said in an interview during a visit to Vancouver. “I never saw any of this coming.”
Willis was born in the farming community of Lethbridge, Alta., and moved to Austin in 1990 in hopes of playing guitar in blues and country bands. He got into music production, served as a roadie with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and spent 16 years with the audio crew of the TV show Austin City Limits, which features live concerts broadcast on PBS.
When he became a father (he has two children, a 21-year-old son and 18-year-old daughter), he decided to adopt a more structured — some might add “indelible” — job. Having befriended a tattoo artist while living in Alberta, he decided to launch his own business in Austin.
“I would tattoo anytime, anywhere,” he recalls. In 1998, Willis visited Vancouver Island on a holiday with his wife Doris in hopes of seeing killer whales, and wound up at Alert Bay, on Cormorant Island near Port McNeill, based on the recommendation of a Lonely Planet travel book.
They saw killer whales and he was so enamoured with the place that he had the images of two of the whales inked on his body.
“We were there two days, and I thought it was the most beautiful, incredible place I’d been to and wondered how the heck would I get back there?” By tattooing — that’s how.
He went to the University of Texas anthropology library to study native culture and art and even found information on traditional Haida tattooing.
The next year he returned to Alert Bay and tattooed locals with both traditional and contemporary designs at the Lions Club, at the firehall and on the BC Ferries vessel. “Old habits die hard when you’re travelling — commando tattooing.”
He also set up shop for about a month in the back of a hair salon. “They just went crazy for it,” he said. “That’s where I cut my teeth.”
In 2001, he contacted a group of Harley-Davidson enthusiasts on Haida Gwaii and found himself working out of a room at the Singing Surf Inn in Masset at the north end of the archipelago. Word quickly spread, and soon he was tattooing multiple generations of the same native family.
“People were practically lined up to get tattoos,” he said.
Weavers received special tattoos on their hands. And the Haida Gwaii Singers Society produced a recording of a traditional tattoo song that is being sold as part of a CD set of Haida songs. “It’s pretty spectacular,” Jones says. “So bluesy, so beautiful.”
One of Willis’s first customers was Joyce Bennett, who maintains knowledge of the old ways of her people.
“Tattooing ended in my great-grandmother’s era,” she explains. “Religion moved in and they were taught it was shameful. They hid them away. It wasn’t anything they wanted to show off anymore.
“Then Bart came along. It’s almost like he belongs to our family now.”
Bennett’s daughter, Vanessa, was first to get a tattoo, at age 25 in 2001. Then one of Bennett’s friends got one, and so it went.
“I was turning 50 that year, turning a new leaf, feeling like I should do something different,” Bennett recalled.
“I wanted a tattoo, and my daughter said if I got one she’d pay for it. It was like we were trendsetters. Everyone started getting tattoos. Everyone is proud of their crests.”
Bennett had a dogfish shark with a woman inside tattooed on her right calf; it followed a design created by her great-grandfather, artist Charles Edenshaw, for her grandmother Isabella, an accomplished weaver. (The Vancouver Art Gallery has an exhibition of Edenshaw’s work running until Feb. 2.)
“It’s new and exciting — a rebirth,” Bennett says of tattooing.
“And I’m telling you, once you get one, one’s not enough. You start thinking about what you’re getting next time Bart comes.”
During one recent trip, Willis dropped by Vancouver and put the word out on Facebook that he’d be doing tattoos at a shop on Nelson Street.
Tony Brown, a Haida from Masset working in a smokery on Granville Island, answered the call.
“I’ve seen his work,” he explained, wearing a Toronto Blue Jays jersey and baseball hat. “He’s tattooed my brothers, my sister, my stepdad, my cousins.”
As a reporter watched, Brown kept his right forearm motionless while Willis used an electric needle to create a representation of a Haida Gwaii watchman.
“Haidas used to be very heavily tattooed back in the day,” Brown said. He looked down at the design materializing before his eyes.
“It’s a symbol of our nation, it sits on top of our totem poles and watches over the land and ocean and the people of Haida Gwaii. “I get to wear it now.” Back in Texas, Willis has also found a market for West Coast-style tattoos among an unlikely clientele that includes a physicist, a mechanic, a land developer, a firefighter, and a military serviceman.
“The style is so graphic and bold. Some people want that. The black tattoo idea is kind of primal desire for people.
“It’s also a great way to draw attention to Northwest cultures and to apply the lessons I’ve learned from them to my art.”
Willis also does Pacific fusion tattoos, combining Polynesian and Japanese styles with West Coast native styles.
Willis’s next goal is to incorporate tattooing into traditional potlatches, perhaps in ancient settings on Haida Gwaii such as Skedans or Tanu, both within Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve.
Jones is equally excited about the prospect of seeing tattooing returned to its traditional role. While tattoos in western society today are often an expression of independence, in ancient Haida society they put you in an elite club.
“Every time you got a tattoo, your society status increased,” Jones says.
Today, any Haida with the financial means can get a tattoo, and Jones doesn’t have a problem with that. Decimated by diseases such as smallpox by the end of the 19th century, her people are still finding their way, still reconnecting with their roots.