Reclaiming, Story 4: Tattoos and Taboos

Whether you have a tattoo or not, we are all familiar with the stigmas that are commonly held against tattoos. Where does this aversion come from? What do these taboos say about history? What do they say about us? In this story, Keoni Rodriguez shares how his tattoos helped him reclaim his indigenous Hawaiian heritage, connect with his ancestors, and begin to heal a history of colonialism and erasure.

Tattoos and Taboos was produced by Ana De Almeida Amaral, Natasha Charfauros, Mikayla An-Yee Chen, & Chloe Gabrielle Mendoza, with support from Laura Joyce Davis and the Stanford Storytelling Project. A special thank you to Keoni Rodriguez for sharing his story with us.

Transcript for Reclaiming, Story 4: Tattoos and Taboos

Chloe: [00:00:00] Close your eyes and imagine someone who has a bunch of tattoos. Who do you think of? 

Michaela: Is it a criminal? How about a biker? 

Ana: Was it me? A Stanford student? There is something in our culture that is resistant to tattoos. 

Michaela: There's something in our culture that tells us tattoos are taboo. But why? 

Chloe: Where does this come from?

Chloe: And what do these taboos say about us? My name is Anna, and this is Tattoos and taboos. Tattoos and taboos. Tattoos and taboos.

Ana: A lot of stigmas around tattoos seem to be shifting. Many people in my generation seem to have an open mind about [00:01:00] tattoos, even those who don't have their own. Still, there's some aversion to tattoos that we're all familiar with. 

Keoni: When my dad found out, it was a big deal at first. He was like, why would your son like, dirty himself like that?

Student: My mom has told me that she would disown me if I got a tattoo, but I think she's changed her mind since then. That was a long time ago. I think like, the elders and like, my parents generation definitely hold a higher stigma towards it. I feel like there's kind of like a perception in the older generation that they're unprofessional.

Keoni: Like I come from a more traditional slash religious background where like tattoos are seen as like, like a sin low key. 

Ana: Where did we inherit these ideologies from? I know my parents passed them down to me, but where did it start? When I started asking these questions, my team interviewed a number of people.

Ana: But then, we talked to Keone, who shared with us a unique story about his tattoos and the [00:02:00] historical stigma he faced.

Ana: Can we, like, take a look at some of your tattoos? Sure. Yeah, 

Keoni: Totally. I did not wear the right clothes. 

Ana: This is my

Keoni: probably most visible tattoo on my right arm. It goes from my wrist to about my shoulder. And my Other traditional tattoos kinda sit on my legs, so the largest one goes all the way up to my hip. 

Ana: Keoni has a lot of tattoos. His arms, legs, and chest are covered in them. At a first glance, they may just look like geometric patterns, but they're actually traditional Hawaiian tattoos.

Ana: Being Hawaiian is a really central part of who Keone is, but there was a time in his youth when he felt a longing to be more connected to where he's from. See, Keoni's part of the Native Hawaiian diaspora. [00:03:00] His mom is Native Hawaiian and Chinese, and his dad is Filipino. But Keone grew up in Southern California, away from his ancestral lands.

Keoni: I saw a lot of people with tattoos, because that's what our community is like. We identify. Ourselves to each other through the sort of very visible means of community identification and always being maybe a little bit insecure but also being very proud of my identity as someone who is Hawaiian but grew up in San Diego.

Keoni: It felt like that was the premier way to make your identity known to others. 

Ana: Keoni grew up not only physically away from Hawaii, his family has also been culturally separated from their heritage. It was Keone's maternal grandfather who was Hawaiian, but he wasn't really part of Keone or his mother's life.

Ana: This cultural separation felt painful, and Keone wondered what would happen [00:04:00] to his younger siblings or their future descendants. Would they grow up without any connection to their culture?

Keoni: I'm the oldest of the oldest child of the oldest child. So my grandparents are oldest children. In the Hawaiian culture, there's a deep responsibility that comes with that. 

Ana: Keoni felt that part of his responsibility was to ensure that his siblings and future descendants would know where they came from and be able to carry on their family heritage.

Keoni: You know, I hope my kids know more than I know, and I hope their kids know more than they do. And so, to be the one to initiate the process of reconnection was something that I knew I had to do, but there's a really heavy burden that comes with that. 

Ana: And so, Keoni made the decision to get a traditional Hawaiian tattoo on his leg.

Ana: But there was still something that Keoni had to do before he could get it. He had to tell his [00:05:00] grandparents.

Ana: He traveled back to Oahu to get this tattoo and stayed in his grandparents house, but he was really scared to tell them about his decision. 

Keoni: When my mom got tattoos, I heard from them that, you know, they almost disowned her. 

Ana: As Catholics, they held some pretty conservative views about tattooing despite their family's cultural ties to the practice 

Keoni: as they're very Catholic.

Keoni: This idea is that your body is a gift from God and you should not mark it. 

Ana: He was scared of how they would react. Would they throw him out of their house? Would they react like they did with his mom? He was nervous about what getting the tattoo would do to their relationship, but he was, in part, doing it for them.

Keoni: You know, if this tattoo is to mark my commitment to family, even though the tattoo is to identify myself as a Hawaiian and neither of them are Hawaiian, [00:06:00] they're still my family. And so, if the tattoo is about my family, I can't get it without them. 

Ana: On the day of his tattooing ceremony, Keone stood in the kitchen, standing across from his grandparents.

Ana: He looked at them in anticipation and uncertainty, listening to the ringing of his heartbeat in his ears, already imagining how they might react. But behind Keone's fear was a stigma of tattoos that was way bigger than his grandparents. It came from the history of colonization in Hawaii.

Ana: In 1820, Protestant American missionaries arrived in Hawaii, seeking to convert Native Hawaiians. This missionary presence continued a cultural genocide that had began with the European colonization of the island 50 years before. Part of this cultural genocide was a systematic erasure of things like [00:07:00] language and Native spiritual practice.

Ana: Then, when the United States overthrew the Hawaiian government in 1893, they implemented a ban on Hawaiian language, and it was not taught in Hawaiian schools for four generations. While there was not an explicit ban on traditional Hawaiian tattoos, Heavy missionary presence and colonial powers on the islands manifested in a strong stigma around tattoos.

Keoni: Tattooing was seen to be marking something that God had created and so tattooing was an outright band but it was definitely discouraged and so Hawaiian converts to Christianity would also speak lowly of tattooing at times. 

Ana: These negative beliefs around tattoos weren't just about religion. It was about stigmatizing a visible connection to Native Hawaiian culture.

Ana: Cultural genocide doesn't just take the form of direct, systematic banning of [00:08:00] cultural practices. Perhaps even more sinister and pervasive are the stigmas that are planted into a society. So even once these policies become repealed, we stay deeply embedded in these aversions. And at some point, these beliefs become all that we know.

Ana: And so, as Keone was working up the courage to tell his grandparents that he was going to get this traditional tattoo, he faced not only the fear of his family's disapproval, but also the stigmas around tattoos that were created by legacies of colonization in Hawaii. Keone's fears were at the forefront of his mind, but there was something beneath his skin.

Ana: aching to come to the surface, and he couldn't ignore it. 

Keoni: I get there and it's a perfect sunny day. The tattoo practitioner told me to meet him at a place called Heiaiva, Heian. So Heian is [00:09:00] an Hawaiian temple, a place of worship. And that specific temple was a temple of healing. We did ceremony before the whole process even started.

Keoni: We made an offering, and he gave me a tea leaf. He rolled up this leaf, and I put it in my waistband for protection. And from there, I laid down on the ground, and he just started tapping. 

Ana: For the type of Hawaiian tattoo that Keone was getting, a traditional tapping method is used, not a tattoo gun. 

Keoni: You know, he's tapping, and it's like, tap, tap.

Keoni: Over time, there's a rhythm that comes along. Gets accumulated. 

Ana: As Keoni laid on the ground of the temple listening to the tapping of the needle against his skin, he began to think about the commitment that was getting this tattoo. 

Keoni: My reason for getting the tattoo is as I want other people to see it. I want people to know.

Keoni: These are my responsibilities as a Hawaiian. I have committed to being a Hawaiian in such a [00:10:00] visible and physical way that you are allowed to hold me accountable to that. If you see me not living up to those ideals, you can, you can just call me out right here, because you can see my commitments, right?

Keoni: I think at the end of it was just This feeling of almost like a burden being lifted. It felt like I was carrying a lot before I had entered that space. After being able to see it and just feeling that burden lifting off of me, I think that it felt like a door had opened, but also this feeling of reverence and sacredness.

Keoni: It felt like a familiar thing. 

Ana: The patterns that were marked on his leg were images that represented each layer of his lineage. Some parts of the pattern were visual representations of the names of his ancestors. From this moment on, a commitment would [00:11:00] be on his body forever. A commitment to bridging those that came before him.

Ana: to those that will come after him.

Ana: Keone found that even though his grandparents had held these stigmas around tattooing, they did want Keone to be connected to this deep lineage that he's part of, and to be connected to something that had been taken away from the generations before him. 

Keoni: I think their worry was that because their daughter lives in California, That I would be separated from my culture.

Keoni: And so we both have similar motivation. I wanted to be connected to my community. They also wanted that for me. 

Ana: Now, whenever they take pictures together, they tell Keoni 

Keoni: so, so you're good. Like, you know, show it off a. 

Ana: When we think of the origins of tattoo stigma, [00:12:00] especially in communities of color, do you immediately think of colonization?

Ana: Most people probably don't. Keone's story is a unique one that is really specific to the Native Hawaiian community, but it holds something relevant to all of us. We all exist within a culture that is deeply embedded in colonial logic. Even if we don't claim to subscribe to these stigmas around tattoos.

Ana: We've all been raised in a culture that does. Keone's story makes us confront our taboos and ask, how many of our stigmas are much bigger than us? How many of our beliefs are rooted in structures of oppression? 

Michaela: Do we even know the legacies of violence we're still carrying out? What are we 

Chloe: doing in our own lives to understand the products of these histories?

Chloe: What are we doing to challenge them? 

Michaela: And how are we going to remake them for future generations? 

Chloe: This is Tattoos Taboos. 

Michaela: Tattoos Taboos. 

Chloe: [00:13:00] Tattoos Taboos. 

Ana: This piece was produced by 

Michaela: Michaela Chen, Chloe Mendoza, and 

Ana: Ana del Medamoral. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions and Tabaka.