Mohave Indians' Body Paint and Tatooing

The oldest known tattoos were found on the remains of a dude over in Europe on the Italian-Austrian border in 1991.  It's estimated that he was over 5,000 years old.  (That would make him a contemporary of Adam and Eve maybe!!)  Two thousand years ago the Romans named one of the northern tribes of the English Isles, "Picti."  That's translated as "the painted people."  It was about that time that tattoos, then known as stigmata, transitioned from being marks of the upper class to marks indicating the person was a slave, criminal or belonged to a religious sect.  Around 300 A.D.  the Roman Emperor Constantine (the first Christian Emperor of the Roman Empire) banned tattoos because he felt that they disfigured mankind who was created in the image of God.


According to the information in the Kingman museums, the Mohave Indians were sandwiched between the California tribes to the west (which were into body tattoos) and other Indian tribes to the east (which were into body and face paint).  Being clever traders who knew how to blend in, the Mohaves adopted BOTH.  (I suppose that they were ancestors of the Dallas Cowboys' Dion Sanders who wanted to play pro football AND baseball.)  Only the Yuman peoples combined the painting and tattooing.

To make the paint, the Mohaves kneaded deer fat while adding their paint to it.  Then they continued kneading it until the fat was like bread dough.  The paint would last a whole day - unless they sweated.   Red pigment came through trade with the Walapai who found it in their Red Mountain.  The Mohaves traded corn and pumpkins for it. 

The tattooing wasn't a very pleasant thing to get through.  The design was drawn on with charcoal, and then a sliver of stone was used to make skin pricks close together.  When the blood flowed, mesquite or willow charcoal that had been ground into a fine powder would be rubbed into the wound.  It took hours just to do a chin tattoo.  The design used on Olive Oatman was reserved for marking slaves.  (WHAT?!  The white man was not the only ones to have slaves?!  Imagine that!)

(Not my drawings :)

Most Mohaves had tattoos because a person without them would be refused into the "Land of the Dead" and had to "go down a rat hole" instead.  Even so, the tattooing process was so very painful that some refused, preferring the possibility of a rat hole to the certainty of pain.

Today's tattooers use pain killers, so it's not the symbol of strength that it once was.