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The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (Women in the West) Paperback – April 1, 2011
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Editorial Reviews
From School Library Journal
This engaging biography examines the life of Olive Oatman, who was 13 years old when Indians attacked her Illinois Mormon family on its journey west; she was subsequently adopted and raised by the Mohave tribe. Mifflin (English, Lehman Coll., CUNY) tells Oatman's story, from the unorthodox religious convictions that led her family west, through her captivity and assimilation into Mohave culture, to her rescue and reassimilation. Mifflin engagingly describes Oatman's ordeal and theorizes about its impact on Oatman herself as well as on popular imagination. The author seeks to correct much of the myth that has sprung up around Oatman, owing partly to a biography written with Oatman's participation during her life. Mifflin takes the position that Oatman was almost fully assimilated into Mohave culture and resisted "rescue," and that her return to mainstream society was a cause of ambivalence, if not anxiety. Though Mifflin sometimes seems a bit eager to make this argument, her book adds nuance to Oatman's story and also humanizes the Mohave who adopted her. Recommended for general readers as well as students and scholars.—Julie Biando Edwards, Maureen & Mike Mansfield Lib., Univ. of Montana, Missoula
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
"The Blue Tattoo is well-researched history that reads like unbelievable fiction, telling the story of Olive Oatman, the first tattooed American white woman. . . . Mifflin weaves together Olive's story with the history of American westward expansion, the Mohave, tattooing in America, and captivity literature in the 1800s."—Elizabeth Quinn, Bust
(Elizabeth Quinn Bust)"In The Blue Tattoo, Margot Mifflin slices away the decades of mythology and puts the story in its proper historical context. What emerges is a riveting, well-researched portrait of a young woman—a survivor, but someone marked for life by the experience."—Jon Shumaker, Tucson Weekly
(Jon Shumaker Tucson Weekly 2009-09-10)“Although Oatman’s story on its own is full of intrigue, Mifflin adeptly uses her tale as a springboard for larger issues of the time.”—Feminist Review
"The Blue Tattoo is well written and well researched; it re-opens the story of white women and men going West and Native people trying to survive these travels."—June Namias, Pacific Historical Review
(June Namias Pacific Historical Review 2010-05-01)“Mifflin’s treatment of Olive’s sojourns [provides] an excellent teaching opportunity about America’s ongoing captivation with ethnic/gender crossings.”—Western American Literature
“Mifflin engagingly describes Oatman’s ordeal and theorizes about its impact on Oatman herself as well as on popular imagination…. Her book adds nuance to Oatman’s story and also humanizes the Mohave who adopted her. Recommended for general readers as well as students and scholars.”—Library Journal
(Library Journal 2009-04-01)
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
More About the Author
Margot Mifflin writes about women, art, and contemporary culture. The author of "Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo" (Powerhouse Books, 1997 and 2013), she has written for The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, ARTnews, Salon.com and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Mifflin is a professor in the English Department of Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY)and co-directs the Arts and Culture program at CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism, where she also teaches. Her book, "The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman" was published by The University of Nebraska in 2009.
Mifflin has appeared as a lecturer and keynote speaker at dozens of colleges, universities and museums, including Barnard College, Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Los Angeles MOCA and The Brooklyn Museum of Art. She appeared in MSNBC's documentary, "Women and Tattoo," and CNN's "Women of the Ink." She lives in Nyack, New York.
Mifflin has appeared as a lecturer and keynote speaker at dozens of colleges, universities and museums, including Barnard College, Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Los Angeles MOCA and The Brooklyn Museum of Art. She appeared in MSNBC's documentary, "Women and Tattoo," and CNN's "Women of the Ink." She lives in Nyack, New York.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
30 of 31 people found the following review helpful
By
Ruth P. Price
on October 20, 2009
Format: Hardcover
2 Comments
Sending feedback...
After tribe members murdered her parents and most of her siblings, the Yavapai Indians kidnapped Olive Oatman and her younger sister Mary Ann. Brutally treated as slaves by their captors, Olive and her sister were later traded to the Mohave Indians who eventually adopted them into the tribe where they were treated as family. Mary Ann died of starvation during a bleak winter, but Olive survived and was later traded by her Mohave family to whites. A brother who the Yavapai left for dead survived and later reconnected with Olive.
Interviews during her first days back into white society show that Olive grieved her Mohave family and spoke of them as being kind and caring. Later, under the influence of a minister who hated Indians, Olive lectured throughout the East about her terrible treatment from both tribes. Olive received an excellent education and was a spell-binding speaker. She later married and her husband made every effort to erase her captive past.
The book is well-written and thoroughly researched, but I had difficulty with the author laying the entire blame for Olive's shifting position toward her Indian life entirely on the preacher. Olive was clearly an intelligent and independent woman who could have taken a more even-handed approach in her lectures about her treatment. Certainly some white women who were former captives and then integrated back into white society were able to speak more fairly about their captivity. I was left with many questions about why Olive was both able to seek out, in her later life, a meeting with one of the members of the Mohave tribe in Washington, D. C., as a seemingly fond gesture and yet also took part through her lectures in promoting the annihilation of the Indians.
Interviews during her first days back into white society show that Olive grieved her Mohave family and spoke of them as being kind and caring. Later, under the influence of a minister who hated Indians, Olive lectured throughout the East about her terrible treatment from both tribes. Olive received an excellent education and was a spell-binding speaker. She later married and her husband made every effort to erase her captive past.
The book is well-written and thoroughly researched, but I had difficulty with the author laying the entire blame for Olive's shifting position toward her Indian life entirely on the preacher. Olive was clearly an intelligent and independent woman who could have taken a more even-handed approach in her lectures about her treatment. Certainly some white women who were former captives and then integrated back into white society were able to speak more fairly about their captivity. I was left with many questions about why Olive was both able to seek out, in her later life, a meeting with one of the members of the Mohave tribe in Washington, D. C., as a seemingly fond gesture and yet also took part through her lectures in promoting the annihilation of the Indians.
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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful
By
Rico X Ludovici
on December 15, 2009
Format: Hardcover
2 Comments
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Maybe 15 years ago I found a used reprint copy of the 'Captivity of the Oatman Girls' while on a trip through the Mother Lode country with my wife and kids. The prose was turgid and the story heated up; the author's provocative sexual elisions made for a rollicking if only partially believable tale. I couldn't stop wondering what Olive's life was like after she returned to "civilization". Since then, I always shiver a bit when I drive under the freeway sign on the Arizona border that says "Oatman exit". Wow. Here is the real place where her family was massacred and her brother left for dead by the local indians.
This book is exactly the kind of scholarship that needed to be done on the topic. Although the girls were kidnapped and their family destroyed, Olive Oatman ended up living for four years with the Mohave indians in a land-locked paradise of cool water and abundant food. She was not a captive but an adopted daughter and her return to 19th century 'civilization' was anything but a rescue. The book is a sweeping review of the widely dispersed resources available to a trained researcher: archives, secondary literature, ethnographic studies, newspaper articles and eyewitness accounts. The author has assembled an extremely readable account of Olive's life and the historical period of Western expansionism. This is not a biography. It is a very interesting story; fascinating and immanently readable. I particularly liked the fact that the author dealt with Olive's twofold cultural assimilation at an impressionable age, first to a Native American culture at age 14 and then back to the Anglo world five years later. Rather than declaim on the effect it had on her personality, the author allows friends and relatives to share their impressions from letters and first hand accounts.Read more ›
This book is exactly the kind of scholarship that needed to be done on the topic. Although the girls were kidnapped and their family destroyed, Olive Oatman ended up living for four years with the Mohave indians in a land-locked paradise of cool water and abundant food. She was not a captive but an adopted daughter and her return to 19th century 'civilization' was anything but a rescue. The book is a sweeping review of the widely dispersed resources available to a trained researcher: archives, secondary literature, ethnographic studies, newspaper articles and eyewitness accounts. The author has assembled an extremely readable account of Olive's life and the historical period of Western expansionism. This is not a biography. It is a very interesting story; fascinating and immanently readable. I particularly liked the fact that the author dealt with Olive's twofold cultural assimilation at an impressionable age, first to a Native American culture at age 14 and then back to the Anglo world five years later. Rather than declaim on the effect it had on her personality, the author allows friends and relatives to share their impressions from letters and first hand accounts.Read more ›
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40 of 48 people found the following review helpful
By
Ben Franklin Bookshop
on May 26, 2009
Format: Hardcover
7 Comments
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Using family letters, documents and contemporary accounts, Margot Mifflin uncovers previously unknown aspects of one of the best known Indian Captivity stories -that of Olive Oatman, the woman whose chin bore the "blue tattoo." On her return to white culture as a "redeemed captive," Olive's tattoo served as a question mark to the shocked and sympathetic audiences who heard her lecture on her experiences - asking the question no respectable person of the time dare voice, what did the savages really do to her?
The horrific massacre of her Morman pioneer family by Yavapai Indians in 1851 began thirteen year old Olive's six-year adventure (or ordeal, as the legend would later have it). She and her sister, at first slaves of the cruel Yavapai, were purchased a year later by the much gentler, now little-known, Mohave people. In a secret valley of the Colorado River, the "American Nile" (the yearly fertile flooding ended with the construction of Hoover Dam), the girls entered an ancient Utopian culture, perhaps unique among American Indians.
The Mohaves lived a near-vegetarian, near-nudist, sexually promiscuous life, and the girls participated in every aspect of the culture -- so much so that the hardboiled cavalry officer sent to "rescue" Olive, and who spoke enough Mohave to understand her nickname (which indicated an exaggerated interest in sex.) changed her name in the Army's paperwork. Olive's tattoo, which was to identify her as Mohave in the afterlife, shows that she became a full member of the tribe, in spite of later revisions to her story.
Olive's adventures didn't end with her return to white culture.Read more ›
The horrific massacre of her Morman pioneer family by Yavapai Indians in 1851 began thirteen year old Olive's six-year adventure (or ordeal, as the legend would later have it). She and her sister, at first slaves of the cruel Yavapai, were purchased a year later by the much gentler, now little-known, Mohave people. In a secret valley of the Colorado River, the "American Nile" (the yearly fertile flooding ended with the construction of Hoover Dam), the girls entered an ancient Utopian culture, perhaps unique among American Indians.
The Mohaves lived a near-vegetarian, near-nudist, sexually promiscuous life, and the girls participated in every aspect of the culture -- so much so that the hardboiled cavalry officer sent to "rescue" Olive, and who spoke enough Mohave to understand her nickname (which indicated an exaggerated interest in sex.) changed her name in the Army's paperwork. Olive's tattoo, which was to identify her as Mohave in the afterlife, shows that she became a full member of the tribe, in spite of later revisions to her story.
Olive's adventures didn't end with her return to white culture.Read more ›
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