ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how French writers and artists represented body marking practices among the indigenous peoples of the Americas. A sign of Amerindian otherness, the tattoo became an object of fascination and study for colonists and missionaries, for whom understanding marks on skin proved essential to the success of their assimilationist enterprise. Indeed, rather than emphasizing difference, seventeenth-century writers often drew parallels with European marking practices, reinforcing through tattooing a common lineage that justified the French colonization of North America. Finally, this chapter investigates the adoption of Amerindian tattooing by French-born inhabitants of New France to express their own hybrid identities.
