The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

by Margot Mifflin

Book Overview

2019 Tucson Weekly "40 Essential Arizona Books" pick
2014 One Book Yuma selection
2010 Best of the Best from the University Presses (ALA) selection
2010 Caroline Bancroft History Prize Finalist
2009 Southwest Book of the Year

In 1851 Olive Oatman was a thirteen-year old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803211481
• ISBN13: 9780803211483
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

EXCEPTIONAL BOOK

We've recently seen a couple books on Olive Oatman or the Oatman massacre with both books being very informative. This book, however, is an exceptional book by any reasonable and objective reader's standard. While enjoying both books (The Oatman Massacre and The Blue Tattoo) I found this book to have a better overall layout and was more smoothly written. In fact I read the book in mostly one sitting. Past history has shown me, having hundreds of books on the shelves from U. of Oklahoma and U. of Nebraska, that Nebraska Press books are reliable as well as solidly written. This book from the Women in the West department is no less so. This is probably the closest we will ever get to the actual story of Olive Oatman and the horrific massacre of her family those many years ago. Recommended for all objective, reasonable readers of western non-fiction. Semper Fi.

The Blue Tattoo: I read it cover to cover on Christmas Day

Mifflin's book is fascinating. The story it tells is such a wonderful slice of American history--revolving around the capture of Olive and Mary Ann Oatman, their sale from one tribe to another, the sale of Olive BACK to the whites, then the exploitation of her story, her lecture series, and finally, her attempt to lead a life as a married Anglo woman. I could just envision this story being made into a movie--of course, I fear the story would get distorted by Hollywood--but if I were Prof. Mifflin's agent, I'd be on the horn to Hollywood. This solid piece of scholarship tells a fascinating story -- lots of insight into western expansion -- all by focusing on the story of this one woman. 5 stars.

Page Turner

Most books about women captured by the Indians are filled with how awful life was. This book shows that not all Indians were brutes and often times the women that were captured were not mistreated. Great read, remarkable courage .

A Young Mormon Girl Enters A Strange Sexual Utopia

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. She became a successful author and lecturer under the influence of a preacher-with-an-agenda who practiced a sort of ventriloquism, revising Olive's experience as a "captive" while using her to deliver his own message of racial hate and misogyny. Margot Mifflin, who has a special interest in women and tattooing, is also the author of Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo. Here she examines the effect of Olive's tattoos -- as well as five-plus years of nudity and sexual freedom-- on Olive's body-image and sense of self, and how shaping and retelling her story allowed her to move into polite society. Mifflin's portrayal of Mohave culture and Olive's life within the tribe was the highlight of the story for this reader, but the entire book was a can't-put-it-down kind of read. Michael Houghton Ben Franklin Bookshop

Fascinating

Olive Oatman's gripping tale comes to life in THE BLUE TATTOO as Margot Mifflin takes us on her family's doomed westward journey. Oatman's subsequent years with the Mohave followed by her return to white society--where she was treated as a curiosity--are fascinating. Mifflin demonstrates that from the time of Oatman's abduction to the present, the question has been, who has taken ownership of her story and for what purposes has it been used? Oatman led a conflicted life, and Mifflin honors her for having maneuvered its complexities.