We are talking about tattoos today! If you’ve been around the Filipinx diaspora decolonization online community, you may be familiar with Lane Wilcken, also known as Manong Lane.

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Per Lane’s website, Lane is an artisan of ancient technology and art. He is widely recognized by the Filipino-American community as a "mambabatok," a cultural tattoo practitioner only using ancient hand-tapped tattoo techniques. He makes all his own tools, many of which are now extinct in the Philippines. Lane's practice is spiritual and includes meditation and prayer before composing batok (tattoo) arrangements according to the designs and symbols of a person's specific ethnic group and their personal experience. The actual application of the batok is done as ritual, with chants, food offerings and prayers as part of the process.

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In this chapter, Manong Lane discusses the details of pre-colonial Philippine tattoos and their symbolism, as well as the stigmas tattoos currently face in modern western society vs. the originally deeply rooted, spiritual meaning of our ancestral markings.

When the first Spanish explorers arrived in our islands with Ferdinand Magellan in 1521, they originally called the archipelago, “Las Islas de los Pintados” which means, “The Islands of the Painted Ones” because of the abundance of tattooing they saw. Manong Lane highlights that in the western world perspective, the individual is the one who decides when they will be tattooed and what is tattooed on them. In the ancient Austronesian cultures (which includes the islands of Indonesia, the Philippines, Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia, Madagascar and Taiwan), the perspective towards tattooing was very different. Those choices are prerogative of the community and the tattoo practitioner, not the individual.

We further discuss our perspectives on the understandings that men and women received their tattoo markings with different reverence. For example, men had to “earn” their tattoos through requisite bravery, character and knowledge. In contrast, women were naturally "entitled" to receiving tattoos. In fact, women's tattoos displayed messages of the strength, procreative power, and spiritual receptivity she brought with her into the world. They also signified fertility and the bravery and strength needed to endure giving birth. It is also said that the more women had, the more beautiful she was!

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1. Grounding Prayer & @ 1min, 46sec

2. "90 second DECOLONIZING" Heart Check-in @ 3min, 46sec

3. BROWN GIRL CLIFF NOTES / Chapter Overview @ 11min, 36sec

4. Vocabulary Words @ 26min

5. Quotes @ 38min, 23sec

6. Closing Prayer @ 56min, 18sec