Steve Thomas: Terry, Libby, welcome to Circulating Ideas.
Libby Coyner-Tsosie: Thanks so much for having us.
Steve Thomas: I wanted to get started by asking how you both got started in the library profession in the first place?
Terry Baxter: I did it for the money. I was a student in a history program at college and somebody put a job advertisement on the board to work as a student in the archives and it paid about 25% more than I was making full-time managing an Arby’s in the area, and so I said, this is a no-brainer. I’m gonna do this in a minute. So then, liked the work, got a professional job a year or so later and then really fell in love with the work and what it could do and how it could change things and so have been doing that now for going on 40 years.
Steve Thomas: But if you’d gotten that Arby’s job, you could be saying, “We have the meat!”
Terry Baxter: Yeah. In a deep voice.
Libby Coyner-Tsosie: Well, my archives origin story is also in Oregon where Terry is. I was an undergraduate student at Portland State University in Portland, and I got to take a class, it was a public history class with Bill Lang, and we took the whole class in the archives. They let us visit the collections and we got to meet archivists, and I thought, that’s what I wanna do. You can do that as a job? So I ended up going to school for archival studies at University of British Columbia and have bounced around a little bit since then and lived in Arizona, North Carolina, and now Massachusetts. And I feel like archives have taken me to all those places. So it’s been a fun ride.
Steve Thomas: So archives don’t just take you through your mind to various places. You get to go physically various places.
What inspired the two of you to write Stories on Skin? I know you’ve done presentations on the topic before, and I guess initially even, what brought you to the topic and then what inspired you to write the book?
Libby Coyner-Tsosie: Well, I’d say that it started probably in 2011, 2010 that I was actually working on a PhD that I dropped out of at Arizona State University, and I wanted to write about tattoos as personal archives. I ended up never finishing that dissertation, never finishing the program, but it ended up turning into a topic that Terry and I talked about. We sort of built this little group including Stephanie Kays and one of my archival heroes, Verne Harris from the Nelson Mandela Center for History and Memory. We invited everyone to be on a panel and we ended up talking about it at the Society of American Archivist Conference in San Diego in 2012? For being in history, I’m not great at dates.
And then pretty soon after that, I think I dropped out of my PhD program. Actually, this book project has sort of resurfaced all these memories of failed attempts to write this in other settings, but I’m not sure that an academic setting would’ve even been the appropriate venue. So it turned into something that was a conversation that started years ago that has led to a lot more conversations and a lot of exchange with archivists. And I think that’s been the most exciting part, is just being able to have this conversation with a lot of tattooed memory workers. Turns out there are many!
Terry Baxter: Yeah. And it was funny how it led to the book because we did the presentation and then we’ve just talked about it since, kind of like informally, just conversationally with other archivists among ourselves, that sort of thing. And then out of the blue in 2019, a woman named Jessica Gribble contacted me and said, one of your coworkers said you’ve got this great topic and maybe you should write about it. And I said, I’ve never thought about that, but if we can write it together, if Libby and I can do it together, ’cause we’ve done this whole thing together from the start, I’d be cool with that.
She said, yeah, that’d be fine. And so Libby and I talked about it, we said we’d do it and signed the contract and boom, COVID hit. And so I don’t think I even thought about the book for a year and a half after that. And then we refocused and we jumped on it and now it’s out there for everybody.
Steve Thomas: Libby, maybe now you can send the book to that old university you were at for the PhD program and say, this is my dissertation. Here, give me my degree!
Terry Baxter: Just take a sharpie and write “dissertation” on the front.
Steve Thomas: So like you said, the overall argument of the book is tattoos are personal archives. How do you define an archive in this context and how do tattoos fit into that definition?
Libby Coyner-Tsosie: I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I know that we have all these professional standards that tell us that archives need to have some amount of permanence and that they need to have fixity and we have to be able to preserve them and document the chain of custody and put them in a box and whatnot.
But I think that we also know that there are a lot of limitations with archives. So I think this topic explores that space in between the reality of archives and what is possible. Tattoos are just one of many ways to explore other ways that we document our histories and other ways that we share our stories across generations. I know Terry and I talk a lot about intergenerational transmission of knowledge, and of course we know that the way that we practice archives has a lot of white supremacy built into the insistence on written word when we have infinite other ways other than just the written word to share stories.
I think there were so many layers to this. There are elements of thinking about where tattoos show up in our collections, that they’re often criminalized, that they show up in prison registers and things like that. Where they show up in our profession, like what it is like to be a tattooed archivist and different ways that people might perceive you as professional or not professional. There were just kind of a lot of things. The topic of cultural appropriation I think is important and that’s something that we should always think about.
Terry Baxter: Yeah, I think about this a lot because I think archives is not well known in general. People kind of know about it a little bit more since archives has been in the news in the last few years, but I think archives is one of those kind of mysterious subjects that people have an idea about, but they’re not clear about. I think that that’s partially due to the archivists not making it clear. One of the things when I think about archives, Libby was getting to transmission of knowledge through generations, but it’s purposeful transmission, which I think is different than just kind of like accidental. Archives are things that somebody said, this is important enough for me to put down, and then archivists have said, this is important enough for us to preserve and then move on to the next generation. So there’s the kind of these mechanics that go through that transmission of knowledge, but at the core of that, it’s something that our ancestors thought was important enough for us to know now, and that we now think we’re gonna say it’s important enough for us to preserve it for somebody else down the line. And I think that tattoos fit into that really well in a lot of ways, although the one way that’s strange about it is that for the individual, that tattoo is gone when you’re gone, right? And so you have to purposefully tell the story about it, or you can replicate it or tell the story about it or something through generations.
I was thinking about this in another context. Vine Deloria reoriented me about the Seven Generations principle which a lot of people think of it as seeing into the future 200 years, thinking about what people then need and he thought about reorienting that so that you see yourself as the seventh generation in the middle of a branch to the past, to people three generations back and a branch to the future of generations you probably will know, and seeing yourself as kind of a cultural and and knowledge transmitter through time. And I think that’s the way I kind of think about archives and I think tattoos fit into that because that’s a human scope that transcends 200 years. I knew my grandpa when he had a tattoo. I know my son when he’s got a tattoo, maybe his offspring will have a tattoo or someone that he talks to, so we can talk about this thing that has actual meaning over a long span of time among generations.
Steve Thomas: Yeah and you talk about it a little bit there in the first chapter, especially of how the current state of libraries, archives, museums, we’re working on it and getting better, but it still takes the basic structure from western European colonialist attitudes and backgrounds. What are some ways that you see that that’s still affecting things and how are things starting to change in that mindset?
Terry Baxter: Well, I think the slow and steady movement of community archives towards the center of archives theory and practice is reflective of those trends. I don’t think there’s many people that are saying, well, there would be some, but I’m not one of them, that would say, we don’t need any institutional archives. We don’t need any government archives. We don’t need any of that. But what I would say is that the more those institutional archives can move towards the kind of ethos of a community archives, the better off we’ll all be. I think community archives provide meaning to communities in ways that other organizations that see themselves as separate.
I think that’s one of the things you’re getting at with traditional archives is that archives, museums, libraries see themselves as separate. They see themselves as whatever colonialist model you want to say, but they see themselves as somebody that provides something to somebody else in a transactive way and that these communities are then either places to exploit, to extract resources or markets to get resources to. And I think that that model really reflects the way that these institutions were built. I think if you start to think about things like tattoos or recipes, songs or dress or dance or many other things that people use to transmit knowledge and you see those as not better; you see them as equal, there’re a bunch of equal pieces, all of them providing the community with something that’s useful for community resilience and joy. And I think that’s really the structure that we’re looking at and trying to break down is that sense that these are knowledge things that are separate and they’re kind of doled out to people as they either need or deserve ’em as opposed to just being available as something that anybody that’s in the community could use.
Libby Coyner-Tsosie: I think the only other thing I’d like to add to that is that being a tattooed person is an embodied experience. And so just like all the ways that we talk about how the traditional ideas of who we think should be an archivist really can expand. I think a lot of times, there’s this idea that there’s a professional looking person who is often white and not tattooed and doesn’t appear in the world in a way that will confront our donors or our patrons. I feel like I hear a lot of coded language in archives and we know this is how it plays out, that it is often really exclusionary and I think that tattooed archivists are just like a lot of other archivists, who deviate from that.
It’s just yet another way that I think we expand the networks of archives. That means we expand who can come into the archives and feel welcome. It means who can feel like their collections might matter enough to go into an archives and who we might build relationships with. So I think that, at the heart of this, we’ve talked a lot about how tattoos are a way that we build relationships because we kind of witness each other and we say, oh, I like your tattoos, or they might have a symbol of something that’s meaningful to us, a shared thing. And it’s just yet another way that we can connect with people. And I think that it actually just opens up whole new worlds for archives.
Terry Baxter: The whole mess of professionalism is another topic, but this fits right into the idea of gatekeeping through professionalism is done in a lot of different ways, not just tattoos, but I think Libby really gets to the point of that, the idea that professionalism is often the enemy of good work in some places. Professionalism’s for chumps. That’s really the baseline story here.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, I’m going into almost 20 years at my public library, and it’s been within the time that I’ve worked there that our dress guidelines have changed to where you can have visible tattoos.
Terry Baxter: Right, and in Portland you saw it with librarians and baristas. I mean, those are two of the really early groups of people here, apart from like rock stars and people like that, but I mean, people in regular jobs, librarians and baristas were some of the earliest people that were heavily tattooed, at least that I encountered in Portland, and so I think it’s refreshing to see people not worrying so much about stuff like their hair, your tattoos or what jewelry you’re wearing, clothes you’re wearing, that kind of stuff and actually thinking about what you might be bringing to the job.
Libby Coyner-Tsosie: Now that you mention that, Terry, I realize it was being a barista in Portland that was my gateway. That was when I got all the tattoos!
Steve Thomas: I did think earlier when you were mentioning preservation and I’m thinking, you know, in the digital age, that’s another thing of figuring out how to keep all this digital stuff. That came up in a big way when the Library of Congress, you know, pre Carla Hayden, was like, we’re gonna keep Twitter, like all of Twitter. It’s like, what? I don’t understand what you’re even doing there. But just like how do you archive this era of things that are only bits that are gonna break down over time? And also, as you said, you only live for a certain amount of time, so your tattoos are going to disappear at a certain point.
And you can take a picture of it, you could paint it or something, you could find some way to preserve it, but then it’s like taking a picture of the Mona Lisa and putting that up. It’s not the thing, it’s a representation of the thing. The thing itself is gonna go away. It’s very much ephemeral. So how do you see that kind of work in archives, if that’s not too hard of a question?
Libby Coyner-Tsosie: I mean, this is really at the heart of why this question has been interesting to us for over a decade, I think. There was a really great talk that happened at Society of American Archivists in Portland that really hit home to me that like, we are all living embodied archives, and that’s what happens when you’re like a human being who goes out in the world and interacts with other human beings, is you bear witness to each other. You listen to each other’s stories over and over and over again until you’ve imprinted them on your mind.
And so I think this is kind of one of the ways that just us existing as humans in the world and kind of using tattoos as a way to explore how embodied experience is also something that makes us a living, breathing archives all the time. That’s why Terry’s comment earlier about seeing yourself among generations, you know, we hear the stories of our ancestors and we pass them along to the next one. This is one of the ways, and Terry, I’ll let you tell your story, but I love that your example in your family is that you grew up seeing a tattoo on your grandfather’s arm that, like, you put onto your arm that your son has put onto his arm, and at this point, that is how it lives on, is through being tattooed onto the next generation. And it is deeply ephemeral, and like, do we wanna think about taxidermy? Like, where is this conversation going? And I don’t think it has to even go that way. I think that’s one of the beauties of thinking about something outside of the physical limitations of what an archive is traditionally thought to be.
Terry Baxter: Yeah. Thank you for that. That’s a fantastic question. I’ve actually been mulling things right here on the fly because that question really brings up some things that are really interesting. I think Libby’s point is really, really great about the ephemeral nature of things and the fact that permanence is another really strong thing in archives, and it’s not necessarily a real thing. Permanence is basically… you know, some archivists will use enduring or continuing value, those are other ways to look at this. But I think the idea that somehow each individual piece of information is expected to live 10,000 years is just really not the thing. People re-vet that, re- think about it through time. So in our shorter time period, we also do the same thing. But I also get back to Hannibal Lecter of all people, when he talks about when you wanna understand something, you need to get to the nature of it. What’s it trying to do?
And that’s what I think about with this tattoo. And I will delve a little bit into my story of my grandfather. My grandfather had a little tiny military tattoo on his arm. He was in World War II in the Navy, and I grew up seeing it on his arm. I didn’t know any other tattooed people probably until I was in my early twenties. There probably were other ones. I just hadn’t thought about it. I played basketball in an Australian men’s basketball league. I’m betting some of those guys had tattoos too, but I just didn’t think about it.
I thought about my grandpa’s and I would bug him about it. What’s this mean? You know, what’s it all about? Because I was interested in why you would mark your body up like that. And it finally took until the point when I was gonna get a tattoo and I said, I want to get a tattoo that memorializes yours, but I’m not gonna do it until you tell me what it’s all about. ’cause I’m not just gonna put this on my body for no reason. So finally he broke down. He said he was kind of embarrassed. He said, I was in San Diego in basic training and I was kind of drunk with some other guys, and we were gonna get manly tattoos, but I wanted to get something practical so that if they blew my body up and they found just the arm, they could get the benefits to your grandma and your mom easier and there it is. No big secret meaning; he wasn’t part of the Illuminati, nothing like that. It was just ,you know, it was a really meaningful story because it reflected exactly the kind of practical, thoughtful guy he is, but also willing to take a little chance and do something.
So I got a tattoo on my arm. The only thing I changed is I put violets, which is my grandma’s name, in for the stars that he had on his, and then my son wanted to get the same tattoo, and so I told him my grandpa’s story, his great grandpa’s story, who he knew until he was maybe in grade school, and he knew that story and then he knew my story and now he’s got his own story that he can tell other people.
And so the essence of the thing isn’t the tattoo, although the tattoo’s a trigger, really, a memory trigger or an activation, which is kind of a way of looking at archives as well. It’s really a way of saying, there’s something here. What’s the story behind this? Tell the story so that then I can tell the story. And so in that way, even though my grandpa’s dead and in the ground, and I will be soon enough, that story just continues on down the road because we’ve reactivated it with each one, and at some point, maybe it won’t be an important enough story to tell again. And that’s the way archives works too, so I’m really good with that.
Steve Thomas: And did your son put his own twist on it as well, where you said you added a different word than the stars…?
Terry Baxter: He didn’t use violets, but he used just larger military stars, but he colored them violet and so everybody’s got their own little twist on it, you know, they’re all a little bit different. And I think that also allows you to tell what, like when I listen to music, I like covers because you get context and you get layered stuff. That’s the same with the tattoos. You’re getting multiple layers here where you can get a bunch of different stories all encoded in one thing.
Steve Thomas: How do archivists and even tattoo wearers themselves take a responsibility in thinking about that context of what it is, the symbols you’re putting on yourself? How should people be thinking about that?
Terry Baxter: Carefully. We talked about appropriation, but I think the book touches on this, but what I would say about appropriation is that it is very difficult to legislate, and I think that people have found that that you can’t really make up a law that says something, so what it requires is right relationships between people and the idea that you wanna do the right thing.
So one of the first tattoos I wanted to get was a Haida raven, raven stealing the sun. I thought about that for a little bit and I actually drew it out, and then I went and talked to somebody and they said, I don’t think you should get that as a tattoo on your body. And I said, why not? And they said, well, because it has meaning for Haida culture. You’re not Haida and there’s other tattoos you could get. And I said, okay, that’s reasonable. If it would be offensive to some folks, and you know, I don’t have to get that, that person was right. I could have got a lot of different tattoos, and I did get a lot of different tattoos.
So that one, that makes sense to me, and I think it really is conversational in the sense of power imbalance. One of the things that I found in the book that was real interesting is the one on the Inuit revitalization and the woman said, you don’t need to get three lines on your chin if you’re not part of this culture. You can get that, maybe a hundred years from now, maybe that would be a cool tattoo for you to get when our culture’s revitalized and we are strong and, and we don’t care and we wanna include you, but we don’t wanna include you now and you shouldn’t include yourself. And I think a person that has a question about a tattoo should definitely ask. I mean, if you have any kind of question about it, you should ask. And if the answer is don’t get it, then I think even if you don’t think the person’s right, I think if a person says, don’t get it, I think it’s a right relationship for you to say, no, I’m not gonna get it.
That’s just my take on it. I know there’s a lot of takes on this thing, so I’m not trying to say I’m the expert on this, that that’s just where I come to it from.
Libby Coyner-Tsosie: The question that I always kind of ask is one about representation. Who gets to tell the story and who gets to sell the story and who gets to profit from things? And I think acknowledging those power imbalances, acknowledging history should always of course happen within our profession.
And I think one thing hopefully this isn’t too tangential, but I really love the work that Michelle Caswell did on ethics of care and really thinking about relationships within archives and different affective relationships and recognizing that those relationships change over time and so the next generation will probably have a different relationship to the history. Just like when we go in and look at history, we’re like, how would people possibly think it’s okay to have a deed to another human being, but that’s something that, it took time before, I will say, some people have always acknowledged that it’s wrong, but it boggles my mind to see in the archives that anyone ever thought that was an acceptable way to do things.
And so I think that is one thing you have to acknowledge about archives too, is that it is a deposit for the future. It’s gonna be around after you are gone and the next generation might come in, probably will come in and say, this is deeply offensive. Like, how could you celebrate this stuff? How could you preserve this stuff? It’s time to let this history go. And that’ll be on that generation.
Steve Thomas: We’re seeing now, not to go too far down into a political discussion, but you know, of how things can be shaped by who’s in charge and they can change, like, I don’t wanna focus on DEI anymore, and now it’s all out. But that’s one of the things that’s important, I think, about what you were saying about community archives is that you don’t let centralized power go into one place, and that’s the only place that culture is kept. You’ve gotta keep it as a culture and, you know, digitally we can do that with things like the Internet Archive and other places, but at a certain point, it is hard to keep that if you keep it centralized.
Terry Baxter: Yeah. I have a a formal menteeship program through the Archives Leadership Institute, and this person is the archivist for the Transgender Digital Archives. We’ve talked on multiple occasions about the need to make that information safe through time in different ways, in different contexts, and both of us were talking about, the main reason for this is so that future generations know the real story, that it’s not a constructed story by some winners. It’s a true story told by the community that it impacts. And so, yeah, I think that there’s all sorts of ways to do that. And whether it’s marking your body, hiding stuff, moving stuff around, duplicating it, by whatever means necessary to preserve that information, to tell a true story in the future is what archivists do.
Steve Thomas: And memorial tattoos are one of the kind of tattoos that you discussed in there, and that’s a much more personal kind of thing. How do you see those as reshaping the way that we think about remembrance and memory preservation?
Terry Baxter: Memorial tattoos are funny to me in some ways, not funny, haha, but they’re interesting to me in a way that they relate to some of the discussions around archives about constructed archives, that they’re purposefully constructed to leave a purposeful record. They’re telling a message the way you wanna leave that message and not just a trace, and so I think that there’s something to that, but I also think that the memorial tattoos and memory are really locked into some of the deepest concepts around archives.
The idea that you are trying to not just, this isn’t just a document, this is a continued conversation, which archives are really, if you look at like Brothman’s or Verne Harris’ thoughts on repeated activations of records creating new archives. That’s what memorial tattoos are intended to do. They’re intended to process a person’s feelings about something by continuing to talk about it and get feedback and continue to iterate on this thing. So it’s not that you just put this date on your arm and, yeah. Wow. That’s the last time I ever thought about that. I mean, when you put a memorial tattoo on your body, what you’re saying is, I’m gonna look at this and I’m gonna talk about this every day to different people, and I’m gonna get different thoughts about it and it’s gonna change. My conception of what is being memorialized will change through time.
And I think that’s really is in strong correlation to archives theory for other types of archives. I mean, this is really what archives are about, and for me, memorial tattoos are really powerful. I love the story of the biker dude. I can’t remember her that tattooist’s name was Peacock, I believe, or maybe that was the book’s author. But the tattooist had this biker guy that came in with a big empty cemetery, well, half full cemetery by the time she was tattooing on his back, and when his friends would die, he would just put another tattoo on one of the headstones in the cemetery. And, I mean, it’s just, it’s wild. I didn’t stumble on this by myself, but it relates to New England quilting traditions where they would build quilts and have the coffins outside the borders. And when someone died, they’d put them inside the bordered area or the cemetery part of the quilt and move them in there.
And so this idea of reflecting, but also planning for the future really, really fascinates me. And I think memorial tattoos fit into that context really well.
Libby Coyner-Tsosie: I think also, and I will say that Terry did most of the writing about memorial tattoos, and I think that one of the ways that I kind of have thought of that idea a bit more expansively is how we sometimes memorialize our own bodies changing. So for me, a big part of tattooing my body was to remember having cancer and I know that is something that you know, a lot of folks I’ve known who have had like mastectomies, have had tattoos that work with the changes that happened with the body to honor that change, to honor the surviving, always remember that that happened, but also to kind of make it decorative. And that has also been a useful way of thinking about tattoos as a way of remembering things that our own bodies have experienced.
Terry Baxter: Yeah, my wife has two tattoos and both relate to her breast cancer. One is a pink ribbon on her arm, and then she has a flower tattoo over her mastectomy. So that’s exactly what she has them for, and one of our contributors has a memorial tattoo, one of our archivist contributors in the book. His son committed suicide and he has three tattoos that are memorial tattoos, but one of them includes the ashes of his son so he can both memorialize and carry his son with him, and I thought that was very moving ’cause I know him, but it’s also, I think people want to have, it’s not a connection to the past.
And I think that that was something, somebody in one of the quotes in the book talked about this, but it’s not a connection to the past; it’s a conversation with somebody who’s moved on, but it’s a conversation in the present. And what they talked about was a lot of cultures who believed that the spirits of ancestors are present with them every day. This is just another way of memorializing or making it tangible that you are in not communication with the past, you’re in communication with people from the past in the present, and I think that also gets to the heart of archives.
Steve Thomas: Keeping them and their stories alive, yeah, absolutely.
You also talk about, and you mentioned this briefly, how tattoos can be integrated into control systems like prisons and the military and even religious institutions at times. How do these types of tattoos either challenge or reinforce the systems of authority?
Terry Baxter: Yeah. The systems of control stuff is interesting ’cause it’s got several different… One thing is it just reflects the way that bureaucratic systems exist, and they don’t exist for archives. They exist to do something. They exist to control people. They exist to process people, whatever it is they’re trying to do, it’s a bureaucratic process, much like the massive amounts of records from the Nazi regime. None of that was intended to be historical documentation of anything. It was just, you know, we’re processing stuff, we’re doing some work, and we got these records to show it. And I think that a lot of these systems of control come right out of that.
The thing that was interesting to me, one of my first encounters with tattoos in a kind of like institutional setting was I had a guy come in here and dig up a record we had of gang tattoos. It was a book that some like City of Portland and Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office had worked together to put up this whole book of gang tattoos so you could look at people and see what gang they we’re in. Well, look what we have in the news today. We’ve got these tattoos and they’re kind of fake identified in a certain way, propagandized. And then we’ve got a Secretary of Defense covered in white supremacist tattoos. And, you know, these are things coming straight outta systems of control, straight out of the idea that you can use a person’s identification against them.
And there’s been the book talks about it a little bit, but the Electronic Freedom Frontier has looked at several constitutional issues around tattoos and the fact that they are probably protected free speech and can’t be used as identifiers or control techniques just in a general population. So if you’re in some prisons then you could use tattoos as an actual method of control inside. But they’re mostly used as identification tools, and I think that the idea that you can put a mark on yourself and not have it say something definitive to somebody about you is an important thing to do. I think our right to express ourselves extends to how we do it on our bodies.
Do you remember the movie, I’d never seen this movie before and so the account of it was really wild to me, but the guy did a movie, a documentary movie, where he convinced a Holocaust survivor to re-tattoo himself there in order to kind of process and move through it. So they actually did, they went through with it, and this Holocaust survivor went to a tattoo shop and had his tattoo re-inked. The conclusion that the documentarist came to was that in the end it was just another system of control. He’d forced a guy to get tattooed in order to do something that he thought was important and really questioned his own thoughts about that. But yeah, I think there’s a lot tied into how people can be controlled and manipulated through not just tattoos, but they could be with tattoos.
Steve Thomas: That’s some good insight from that filmmaker that they actually came to that and publicly still put the film out and with that message, like, oh man, I’m just as bad as what I was just trying to show.
So the last big topic I wanted to explore was that in the book you explore how tattoos intersect with gender and queerness in ways that challenge the conventional narratives. How do you see body art as serving self-definition in those kinds of spaces?
Libby Coyner-Tsosie: Yeah, that was definitely one of my favorite parts of exploring this topic, not just delving into the history of women getting tattooed, which there is a lot of history. We were chatting about that yesterday about how there’s this whole sub-genre of history focusing on the tattooed lady and there’s so much documentation of it, but of course, like the sort of freakishness of it is that it’s on white women. And so I think that just thinking of things in terms of gender, you can’t ignore the intersection with race and how the idea of tattoos being freakish on women is sort of a white supremacist concept, I think.
In a lot of the other cultures that especially indigenous cultures around the world that Terry was exploring, there’s so much history of women being tattooed and so this is really a white, western European kind of idea that women don’t get tattooed. And yet I also think that we can’t ignore our own history and certainly, it has been such a way for people to reclaim ownership of their own bodies. And that is something that shouldn’t be determined by gender. In fact, I know that in so many cases, tattoos can be such an amazing way to explore life beyond the binary, and it’s a way that people can mark themselves visibly. I mean, I think right now visibility feels really important. If it feels safe to you, be visible.
I’ve certainly met lots of people with queer tattoos and how important that was to see those tattoos and to feel like that was a safe person. One of the parts of the book that I wrote about that I really loved was that existing as this queer tattooed librarian, I felt like I became the repository for all of these stories of these kids getting their first tattoo. And so often it is wrapped up in their coming out story or they’re coming out trans story. I witnessed these tattoos. Some are better than others, but like I also means that I’ve gotten to listen to a lot of stories that are really important for young folks which of course is part of being among the seven generations. So it has been a treat to live in this tattooed body and get to hear the stories because of it.
Steve Thomas: That’s nice to hear that it’s even an invitation to other people to share the story as well. And that’s, I think, an important part of it being a physical outward thing, ’cause I talked a little bit before about just sharing stories in general is kind of an archive that you’re keeping, but the tattoo is a physical outward manifestation of that and invites you to go, oh, look at that and compare and just ask about things.
What advice would you give to libraries, archives, museums who want to better capture these kinds of lived non-traditional narratives, I guess is the right word, like tattoos? Other than “Read our book!”
Libby Coyner-Tsosie: I think that the main thing that I always keep in mind is just encouraging people to have an open mind about what an archive’s gonna look like. And that there will be infinite ways that people find ways to create archives after I’m gone in new ways that I’ve never even imagined, you know? So I think just thinking in terms of especially material culture and visible culture, I think that it’s just one way of many. So just be open about what an archives can look like and realize that not everything needs to be permanent and that stories are transmitted across time in all kinds of ways.
Terry Baxter: I’m not much of an advice giver, but what I try and do with this is think of it as, you know, get into your community and find out what your community needs. The archives really don’t matter. The tattoos don’t really matter. The stories matter and the connections matter and how to get the community feeling joyful and strong would be the way. So figure out how to make that happen. If that happens through archives, great. If it happens through tattoos, great. If it happens through building a community garden, great.
People have different ways, aptitudes, ways of seeing things, ways they can do things, so an opportunity will come along, but don’t force it. Don’t come in with the idea that we need to document tattoos. We need to document this or that. What we need to do is build community and at some point maybe it’ll be important to document something or it’ll be important to do that, but to think of the community first and think of all of our other stuff second. Actually think of the human beings in the community first, then think of the community, and then think of everything else after that. That’s the advice I’d have for folks.
Steve Thomas: I think your advice is complimentary because basically you want to go into it like that way, but you don’t want to go into it going, “Oh well, but not tattoos! That’s not an important part.” You know, keeping your mind open to what you’re going out in the community and just everything. Just take it all in.
Terry Baxter: And get more ink. Everybody should get more ink.
Steve Thomas: Support your local tattoo artists.
Libby Coyner-Tsosie: Terry and I have gotten a lot of tattoos together as friends to memorialize different milestones in our lives. So I think we have a great shared repository. We’ve got our next one planned out already. So we’re doing a great job of documenting.
Steve Thomas: Thank you both for joining me today. It’s been fascinating conversation and I know that the listeners will come away hopefully with new ideas of what archives can be, so people should pick up the book,, Stories on Skin and give it a read, or if your library has it, check it out and read it. And thank you all for joining me today.
Terry Baxter: Thank you.
Libby Coyner-Tsosie: Thank you so much.
Circulating Ideas 