✦ Overview​

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Numerous sources document the existence of traditional (pre-contact) tattooing customs amongst the Oceti Sakowin, or the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota, aka the Great Sioux Nation. These tattoos were not only skin deep, but conveyed deep meaning, tribal identity, belonging, and personal history. As an enrolled member of the Ihanktonwan Dakota (Yankton Sioux Tribe) with Lakota heritage, and as a traditional handpoke tattoo artist, designer, and educator, it is my honor to share some of my research here. 

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✦ John Fire Lame Deer (1903 - 1976)

John Fire Lame Deer (1903 – 1976), a wicasa wakan, or holy man, of the Lakota Sioux Nation, shared his traditional tattoo knowledge in the book Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions:

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"From birth to death we Indians are enfolded in symbols as in a blanket. An infant's cradle board is covered with designs to ensure a happy, healthy life for the child. The moccasins of the dead have their soles beaded in a certain way to ease the journey to the hereafter. For the same reason most of us have tattoos on our wrists - not like the tattoos of your sailors - daggers, hearts, and nude girls - but just a name, a few letters, or designs. The Owl Woman who guards the road to the spirit lodges looks at these tattoos and lets us pass. They are like a passport. Many Indians believe that if you don't have these signs on your body, that Ghost Woman won't let you through but will throw you over a cliff. In that case, you have to roam the earth endlessly as a wanagi - a ghost. All you can do then is frighten people and whistle. Maybe it's not so bad being a wanagi. It could even be fun. I don't know. But, as you see, I have my arms tattooed." (Lame Deer and Erdoes 111-112)

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Here, Lame Deer describes the fork in the sacred cottonwood tree, what it represents, and its relation to tattoos: 

“That sacred cottonwood means so much to me. Its leaves are shaped like a heart. When they are twisted they look like a tipi, and when they are flat they symbolize a moccasin. The trunk of this tree represents the Milky Way. The fork, where a limb branches off, symbolizes the place where an old woman – hihan kara – sits in the Milky Way. When we die we have to pass her on the way to the spirit land. If we have a tattoo on our wrists hihan kara lets us pass. Our tattoo marks represent a kind of baptism. Without them we could not go to the spirit land but would have to walk back to the earth as a ghost.” (Lame Deer and Erdoes 220)

In the following, Lame Deer describes how he received a tattoo from “old Mrs. Elk Head,” the seventeenth generation keeper of the White Buffalo Calf Pipe. “My prayers must have helped Mrs. Elk Head, because she recovered and lived for number of years more…. She…told me: ‘The time will come when the Indians will rise again with this sacred pipe, when it will be smoked by all'…. She really was wakan and had the power to see ahead. She also gave me a tattoo and a secret name that went with it” (Lame Deer and Erdoes 279).

✦ 1800s Ethnographers

Ethnographers who traveled through the Plains area during the 1800s sketched several paintings of Lakota and Dakota men and women with facial and body tattoos that depicted their status or bravery during times of war.

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Image 1: Profile view of a Dakota Sioux woman with tattooed chin stripes and honor mark on her forehead. She wears a robe painted robe depicting a Thunderbird or swallow-tailed kite, the Dakota “War Bird.” Art by Karl Bodmer.​

Image 2: Close up of Dakota woman's facial markings.

Image 3: The Yankton Sioux warrior Psihdja-Sahpa with tattooed “hand” honor markings. Art by Karl Bodmer.​