The Blue Tattoo

Margot Mifflin is an author and journalist who writes about women, art, and contemporary culture. The author of Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, she has written for many publications, including the New York Times, the New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, the Believer, and Salon.com. Mifflin is a professor in the English Department of Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and directs the Arts and Culture program at CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism, where she also teaches.

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsPrologue: Emigrant Song1. Quicksand2. Indian Country3. "How Little We Thought What Was Before Us"4. A Year with the Yavapais5. Lorenzo's Tale6. Becoming Mohave7. Deeper8. "There Is a Happy Land, Far, Far Away"9. Journey to Yuma10. Hell's Outpost11. Rewriting History in Gassburg, Oregon12. Captive Audiences13. "We Met as Friends, Giving the Left Hand in Friendship"14. Olive Fairchild, TexanEpilogue: Oatman's Literary Half-LifeNotesBibliographyIndex

"An important and engrossing book, which reveals as much about the appetites and formulas of emerging mass culture as it does about tribal cultures in nineteenth-century America."-Times Literary Supplement "An easy, flowing read, one you won't be able to put down."-Christian Science Monitor "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 "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 "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 "Mifflin's treatment of Olive's sojourns [provides] an excellent teaching opportunity about America's ongoing captivation with ethnic/gender crossings."-Western American Literature "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 "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 "Margot Mifflin sketches out a life in fine detail in her book The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman . . . . It rouses strong metaphors with timeless applications: the idea of what marks us, that which comprises our stories and how they are interpreted, appropriated or manipulated."-Melissa Corliss Delorenzo, Her Circle