
This tradition almost went extinct in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Sapiens explains that the governments of the United States and Canada saw Indian customs, like tattooing, as a threat. Well into the 1970s, America's Bureau of Indian Affairs sent Native Alaskan children to miserable, often abusive boarding schools, to be metamorphosed from Indians to "Americans." The process was even more brutal in Canada, where thousands of First Nations children died in the "residential school system" (via Scientific American). Eventually, almost no one knew how to tattoo as their ancestors had; and as NPR alludes, almost no one wanted to.
In the 21st century, however, a new generation of indigenous women in Canada and Alaska have embraced traditional tattooing, drawing permanent lines down the chins and along the jawlines of their co-nationals. Primarily practiced by women, it's part of an explosion of creativity among the first generation of Indians not raised to view themselves as inferior. As one artist, Stacey Fayant, told the CBC, "People seem to know that they need this and it's for the right reasons ... They are coming to me specifically for a traditional tattoo that connects them to their identity and their culture."
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