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It’s an old photograph, dated 1881, but it reveals a lot about how much Indigenous culture was changed by colonization.

It shows four high-ranking Haida men. On the far right is Chief Xa’na. He’s not wearing regalia over his torso so you can see the grizzly bear tattoo on his chest. What’s remarkable is that the tattoo is a smaller version of the grizzly bear design on the totem pole beside him.

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That made me stop in my tracks. For a moment, the photo created an image for me of what it might have been like before Europeans arrived on the northwest coast of North America.

Whether Haida or Squamish, Musqueam or Heiltsuk, there would have been a visual culture with common motifs that linked bodies and objects. It would have connected the outside world with the inner.

A turning point for tattooing as an active cultural practice occurred after the federal government banned the potlatch in 1885 and then started to strictly enforce it in the 1920s. The ban was especially harmful because tattoos were traditionally done at potlatches as one of the visual representations of each clan’s repertoire of stories.