"Studying the tattoos and scalping scars on early American bodies makes visible a world of signs: stories of alliance, alienation, conflict, and commodification. Body modifications in early America have often been dismissed as curiosities, yet the widely circulated stories and images of marked individuals-as this book demonstrates-were key to understanding the hopes and fears driving cultural boundary crossing in early America"--

Introduction. Stories Written on the Body
Chapter 1. Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted: Colonial Interpretations, Indigenous Tattoos
Chapter 2. The "Ill Effects of It": Reading and Rewriting the Cross-Cultural Tattoo
Chapter 3. Pricing the Part: Economies of Violence and Stories of Scalps
Chapter 4. Playing Possum: Scalping Survivors and Embodied Memory
Epilogue. Narrative Legacies and Settler Appropriations
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Mairin Odle is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama.