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The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (Women in the West)

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The author has practiced source criticism on the various accounts of Oatman's life, discounting distortions introduced to serve various political and social biases. The resulting narrative is a fascinatingly ambiguous story. Was Olive better off as an Indian or white woman? It's hard to tell, but clearly she had warm feelings for her former "captors" when she met one of them in later life. The sexual, social, and racial norms of the time are called into question by the story of her life. This was a very interesting and compelling telling of the life of Olive Oatman. In the early 1850s, Olive was a pioneer girl heading west with her family on a wagon train with a splinter group of Mormons called the “Brewsterites”, a group headed by James Colin Brewster, who broke off from Joseph Smith's church and who thought Eden was waiting for them at the mouth of the Colorado River. (I was brought up in the Mormon Church in Utah and I had never heard of this group). Her father was anxious to get to the "promised land" and did not heed the advice of others to stay together. He pushed on with his family and got stranded resulting in a massacre by the Yavapai Indians in Northern Mexico. Olive's family were all killed with the exception of her and her younger sister, Mary Ann and one brother, Lorenzo, who managed to escape. Olive and Mary Ann were taken into captivity and made slaves by the Yavapais. After one year, they were traded to the Mohave tribe where they were well cared for. But being assimilated into the tribe meant getting tattooed on the chin, a practice all women in the tribe underwent. Mary Ann died of an illness after two years but Olive ended up being ransomed and returned to white civilization after five years with the Mohave. Hsieh, Veronica (November 2011). "Hell on Wheels Handbook – Olive Oatman, a Historical Counterpart to Eva". AMC Network Entertainment LLC . Retrieved 17 January 2019. 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 Is it normal for a blue tattoo to look different immediately after it is done compared to when it has fully healed?

The Wild West and Tribal Quest". The Ghost Inside My Child. Season 1. Episode 3. 30 August 2014. Lifetime. In an episode of the series The Ghost Inside My Child: The Wild West and Tribal Quest, a southern American Baptist family claims that their daughter Olivia says she is the reincarnation of Olive Oatman. [35] I wasn't sure about this going in--after all, a book about an uncultured girl being thrown into finishing school? How many of these awkward fish-out-of-water stories do we need? Based on historical records, including letters and diaries of Oatman?s friends and relatives, The Blue Tattoo is the first book to examine her life from her childhood in Illinois?including the massacre, her captivity, and her return to white society?to her later years as a wealthy banker?s wife in Texas. I've been so intrigued with the Olive Oatman story. When I saw this come up on audiobook, I jumped all over it. Her story of slavery to one Native American tribe after witnessing her family's slaughter and subsequent adoption by another for 5 years has intrigued me. Her time with her Native American tribe was cut short when she was returned to her people and subsequent re-assimilation into white culture. Accounts say Olive wept when she was returned. She was promptly taken in by a racist minister who "co-wrote" her autobiography and launched her speaking career. Mifflin attempts to sift through what was truth and fiction in this accounting of Oatman's life.

Awards

Traveling westward, Olive’s family was killed by the Yavapais Indians. They spared only Olive and her younger sister, Mary Ann. They were captured and eventually sold to the Mohaves Indians, where they were treated well. Only Olive ended up surviving after a famine. She lived with the Mohaves for 4 years before re-entering white society. Mifflin’s treatment of Olive’s sojourns [provides] an excellent teaching opportunity about America’s ongoing captivation with ethnic/gender crossings.”— Western American Literature

I liked that the timeline of events was manly centered around the disaster. There was a small Act to show the reader the romance between Elizabeth and Danny. I liked Danny and Elizabeth as individuals but the romance was - eh. It was clichéd and rushed, but also not the main point of the story. Steven Laffoley's The Blue Tattoo is the first time this award-winning historian has turned to fiction. His focus is the Halifax Explosion.

Praise

The character of Eva Oakes, portrayed by Robin McLeavy in the AMC television series Hell on Wheels is very loosely based on Oatman. [29] Outside of being captured by a group of Native Americans, bearing the distinctive blue chin tattoo, and having been raised Mormon, there are very few similarities between the character of Eva and the actual life of Oatman. [34] Oatman's story is an interesting one, but Margot Mifflin doesn't quite do justice to it, and certainly doesn't do justice to the broader history of which it is part. I'm no specialist in American history, but even I could tell that Mifflin repeatedly fails to truly confront Euro-American settler violence and colonialism. Much of the historiography she draws on is dated, and is overwhelmingly grounded in a white perspective. (More than once I blinked at some of the quotations she used to begin chapters, generally dropped in without qualifier or context.) Mifflin claims to more accurately represent the cultures and histories of the Yavapai and Mohave peoples than have previous recounters of the Oatman , but often does so in language and via framings that seemed to me queasily close to the nineteenth-century Noble Savage narrative. There’s a lot we don’t know about Olive’s life with the Mohaves, but we do know that they tattooed her face, which was a sign that she was considered part of their tribe. She was treated well by the Mohaves but mostly stayed quiet about specific details concerning her life with them. So, there you have it! Blue tattoos are an incredible way to express your individuality, embodying a range of designs, styles, themes, and sizes. Whether you’re a lover of the sea or a geometric pattern enthusiast, there’s a blue tattoo waiting for you. Dive in, and let the color blue make a splash on your canvas! 14 Best Blue Tattoos Designs You Need To See A Blue Butterfly Tattoo, Representing Transformation and New Beginnings Quite a few years passed, where Olive mourned the loss of her parents and got close to her new family. However, there were also hard times. Years of drought where people went hungry and many children died, including Olive’s sister, Mary Anne. Olive was allowed to bury her according to her own religion. She was given a piece of land where Olive planted a garden of wild flowers. The invisible tattoo of Olive Oatman

Oatman Flat". Geographic Names Information System. United States Geological Survey . Retrieved 2022-08-06.Another thing that suggests Olive and Mary Ann were not held in forced captivity by the Mohave is that both girls were tattooed on their chins and arms, [14] [15] in keeping with the tribal custom. Oatman later claimed (in Stratton's book and in her lectures) that she was tattooed to mark her as a slave, but this is not consistent with the Mohave tradition, where such marks were given only to their own people to ensure that they would enter the land of the dead and be recognized there by their ancestors as members of the Mohave tribe. [5] :78 The tribe did not care if their slaves could reach the land of the dead, however, so they did not tattoo them. It has also been suggested that the evenness of Olive's facial markings may indicate her compliance with the procedure. [5] :78

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