Blood Lines Indigenous Tattoo Symposium

For the last few years, artists across Turtle Island have been involving themselves with Traditional Indigenous tattooing as a way to contribute to the revival of traditional tattooing practices. Tattoo practitioners are using ancestral mark-making techniques, ancestral symbolism and creating new iconography to connect Indigenous peoples to their familial knowledges, as dynamic and living cultures.

With an understanding of traditional tattooing practices as informative to Indigenous futurisms, artists have sought knowledge through various modes of learning. This includes exploration of ancestral tattooing histories and colonial records while working between the lines of unrecorded or erased histories. Traditional tattooing can repeal the effects of imperialism and assimilation in our communities to promote personal agency and new ways of being through evolving Indigenous cultural practices and visual arts.