New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians
Mediating Racial Politics from
the Backstreets to Main Street
Cynthia Becker
I
n November 2008, the Mardi Gras Indian Victor Harris,
from The Spirit of Fi Yi Yi and the Mandingo Warriors,
was invited to display some of his handmade costumes,
referred to locally as “suits,” in New Orleans’ first biennial art exhibition, Prospect.1 (Fig. 1). Harris is among
the numerous African American men and women who,
on Mardi Gras, St. Joseph’s Day, and other occasions, perform
wearing beaded and feathered suits, accompanied by friends,
neighbors, and family who constitute the so-called second line.
The catalog accompanying the Prospect.1 exhibition characterizes Harris’s suits as displaying “a highly personal style with an
African inflection” (Tancons 2009:59). Indeed, Harris’s suits,
unlike those of other Mardi Gras Indians who more explicitly
reference Native American culture, also incorporate materials
associated with African art, such as raffia, kente cloth, and cowrie shells, and include face masks and African-inspired shields.
For all its well-intentioned efforts to focus attention on a neglected
art form, Prospect.1, like other catalogs and exhibitions of its kind,
failed to historicize Black Indian aesthetics. For example, there is
no discussion of how the suits made by Victor Harris differed from
those worn earlier by New Orleans’ Black Indians. In the nineteenth
century, Mardi Gras Indians, restricted to New Orleans’ workingclass African American neighborhoods and never featured in museums, made less ornate suits, using discarded beads, turkey feathers,
and fish scales as their primary artistic media (Fig. 2). As racial politics changed and Mardi Gras Indians gradually migrated into the
wider public realm, their suits became increasingly elaborate. In the
aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, they began to be featured
in documentary films and to perform at New Orleans’ numerous
music festivals. By the 1990s, Indians were consciously trying to
outdo each other’s creative skills as images of Indians appeared in
glossy photography books and on postcards (see Breunlin this issue,
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Breunlin and Lewis 2009). In recent years, some Indians, such as
Victor Harris, have displayed their highly personalized handcrafted
suits internationally and are striving to make a name for themselves
as contemporary artists.
The goal of this essay is to examine the how Mardi Gras Indian
suits and performances have allowed African Americans to navigate the racial politics of New Orleans and eventually move from
the backstreets, which I define as New Orleans’ working-class
African American neighborhoods, to Main Street.1 I approach
Black Indian suits as performative objects of cultural mediation
that, as Margaret Drewal argues, constitute discursive practices
whose aesthetic forms are constantly changing in response to
the politics of the moment (Drewal 1991:17). In particular, I draw
upon the research done by Monica L. Miller, whose Slaves to
Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity considers how men of African descent in the diaspora use
clothing and dress to define their masculine identity in different
political and cultural contexts as they negotiate constructions of
race, sexuality, and class (Miller 2009:3–5).
The act of dressing up and “stylin’ out,” according to Miller,
“attempts to escape stereotypes, fixity, essentialization—signify on them—and functions as a process of identity formation
grounded in irony, satire, wit and self-consciousness” (Miller
2009:15). Miller uses the example of the black dandy to demonstrate how black performativity not only exposes race as a social
construct but also acts as a form of cultural resistance, allowing
the enslaved and marginalized to “comment on their relationship to authority” and more often than not to challenge it (ibid.).
New Orleans Black Indians likewise use dress to construct, perform, and manipulate racial constructs as they journey from the
backstreets to Main Street as well as to define their connection to
Africa as they negotiate issues of heritage and commoditization.
1 Suits worn by Victor Harris, The Spirit of Fi-Yi-Yi Mandingo Warriors, Installation view at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Prospect.1 Biennial, November
2008–January 2009
Photo by author
2 In the early twentieth century, New Orleans’ Black Indians commonly used discarded turkey feathers, discarded beads, and fish scales as their primary materials.
Photo: Homer Turner, ca. 1949, “Louisiana Views #4”, The Historic New Orleans Collection, accession 2002.84.1-202
Got to sew, sew, sew:
Resistance in the Backstreets (1880s–1960s)
Scholars estimate that the tradition of African Americans
dressing in Plains Indian style during Mardi Gras began in the
1880s, a period coinciding with the intense racial segregation
and discrimination that accompanied the end of Reconstruction, the removal of Federal troops, and the implementation of
harsh Jim Crow laws, consigning all people of African ancestry
to a subordinate social and economic status. Despite the increasingly limited opportunities for people of African descent in
post-Reconstruction New Orleans, many individuals resisted
white supremacy in informal and indirect acts—in what Robin
D.G. Kelley describes as “hidden forms of resistance” (Kelley
1996:189). One such indirect act on the part of African Americans in New Orleans was the creation and wearing of costumes
on Mardi Gras Day that demonstrate Native American, Caribbean, and African influences. Over time, small groups of African
American men and women organized according to neighborhoods, locally referred to as “gangs” or “tribes,” and dressed in
beaded and feathered suits made by their own hands, marching
through the backstreets of New Orleans’ working-class African
American neighborhoods and stopping along the way to confront rival tribes.
In the early twentieth century, the typical Mardi Gras Indian
suit was comprised of certain standardized components: an elaborate headdress (called a “crown”), long pants, shirt, a sleeveless
vest, and an apron. Each component was decorated variously
with beads, feathers, sequins, fringe, or sewn-on patches with
geometric designs or pictorial images inspired by Native American culture. Among the earliest known photographic images
of the Mardi Gras Indians is a 1949 photograph, taken by the
painter Homer E. Turner, of an unnamed African-American
man wearing a Plains Indian-style war bonnet, consisting of a
decorated headband with a single row of brown turkey feathers that descended to the ground as well as an apron and cuffs
adorned with beads, sequins, and other shiny items worn over a
velvet or satin shirt and fringed pants (Fig. 2). Mardi Gras Indians gathered free turkey feathers from their neighborhood gro-
cers, cut beads and sequins from old evening gowns, and sewed
decorative patterns out of such everyday objects as bottle caps,
buttons, shells, and even fish scales, producing relatively inexpensive, though labor-intensive, outfits. These humble materials
indicate that they probably did not have the financial resources
to purchase materials in craft shops.
In an interview with the author, Victor Harris referred to the
literal blood, sweat, and tears required to make an Indian suit,
recounting the custom of sewers dipping their thread in the blood
of the first person to prick his or her finger while sewing, so that
actual blood is sewn into the suit as a sacrifice that brings life to it.
Harris, who started to mask in 1966, said that in the past that he
wore each suit twice, on Mardi Gras Day and St. Joseph’s Night,
and “after those two days we burned the suits up. We sent them
back to the spirits. It was not for us to wear them again. We salvaged whatever we had to take off them and we actually burned
those suits up.”2 Joseph Roach wrote that for the urban poor, such
vol. 46, no. 2 Summer 2013 african arts
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3 Postcard of a Plains Indian man
in a “war bonnet” published by
Walter Studios, New York and New
Jersey, ca. 1900.
Photographer unknown
4 Montana family portrait. Left
to right: Big Chief Alfred Montana
of the Eighth Ward Hunters, Allison
“Tootie” Montana’s father; Big Chief
Alfred’s First Queen Anabe; and
Allison Montana. 1947.
Photographer unknown, Courtesy
of Joyce Montana
as the Indians, the competitive stitchery and subsequent destruction of a suit each year was a rare form of conspicuous expenditure (1996:206). However, Roach fails to take into account the fact
that many Indians identify themselves as working class rather than
poor and, in addition, their suits were never entirely destroyed. My
interviews with Indians reveal that even if the underlying fabric of
the suit was burned, much of the decorative material was reused
on new suits. Big Chief Darryl Montana, who grew up watching
his father make Indian suits, explained that:
We were burning our suits when we were young because we had no
room in the house to keep them. At that time the stones were glass
and we could not afford to buy those … so what we used to do was
to cut the stones and the beads off the suit and then we would burn
the cardboard and all that stuff. We would pull the beads off and we
would fill up bottles with beads and my daddy would give us five
cents a bottle. And we would burn the suit.3
Mardi Gras Indian headdresses resembled the so-called war
bonnets worn by Native American chiefs and warriors in the
Plains region, among the Sioux, Crow, Blackfoot, Arapaho,
Cheyenne, and Plains Cree. Despite the name, these headdresses
were typically worn by Native Americans on ceremonial occasions rather than into battle. Plains Indian men wearing such
“war bonnets” were the frequent subjects of late nineteenth century photographers and often appeared on postcards and other
forms of widely circulating popular media, which came to represent the archetypal “classic” Native American (Fig. 3).
The fact that the headdresses worn by Black Indians clearly
drew on those worn by Native American men from the northern Plains rather than from the southeastern United States,
such as the Choctaw and the Houma, raises both historical and
interpretive questions. Maurice Martinez, a New Orleans native
and scholar, speculates in his and James Hinton’s 1976 film The
Black Indians of New Orleans that the men and women who
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wear Indian-inspired costumes on Mardi Gras day are in fact
cultural and biological descendants of runaway African slaves
who, given shelter by Native Americans, often intermarried
and lived together. According to the film, New Orleans’ Black
Indians could not adopt the name or tribal dress of their actual
ancestral group because the white population would have perceived this as threatening. Rather, they created fictional names
such as the Yellow Pocahontas and the Creole Wild West and
substituted stereotypical Plains Indian dress for the dress of their
actual tribe (Martinez and Hinton 1976). An iconic instance of
this can be seen in a 1947 photograph of Allison “Tootie” Montana and his father, Alfred Montana, who was Big Chief at the
time: both wear feathered headbands, long-sleeved vests, thick
belts, aprons, pants, and moccasins adorned with beaded symmetrical geometric patterns (Fig. 4). The author Richard Brent
Turner concurs that these “Native American substitutions for
African ceremonial memories were a politically safe strategy” in
the Jim Crow South since by the late nineteenth century, Native
Americans were a defeated people no longer considered a threat
by white society (Turner 2009:55).
The arrival of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the 1880s may
have been a major factor stirring the Black Indians of New
Orleans to reassert their Native American heritage, while also
inspiring African Americans without any Native American connection to imagine such a kinship. Such is the thesis of the white
photographer Michael P. Smith, who amassed a large quantity
of photographs published in his 1994 book Mardi Gras Indians.
Smith attributes the origins of New Orleans’ Black Indians to
Buffalo Bill Cody and his show, which spent four months in the
city between 1884 and 1885, and to the 1885 New Orleans International Cotton and World Trade Fair, which exhibited Plains
Indian art and culture (Smith 1994:96). It should be noted that
most Indians reject Smith’s thesis because it emphasizes imitation over originality and agency, attributing what they consider a
5Rara tunic and pants. UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, X91.94A & B
Photo: Don Cole, © Fowler Museum at UCLA
6
Allison “Tootie” Montana (left) and Edward Montana (right) in front of shotgun house, 1990.
Photo: Michael P. Smith. © The Historic New Orleans Collection, accession number 2007.0130
ric and beads to create forms that resembled the brackets found
on New Orleans’ shotgun houses (Fig. 6). Big Chief Darryl Montana described how his father’s skills as a tradesman translated
into his costumes:
sacred tradition to a cheap form of entertainment that exploited
rather than honored Native Americans.
In addition to Native American influence, the Mardi Gras
Indians exhibit an aesthetic connection to the Caribbean. For
example, Big Chief Allison “Tootie” Montana (Fig. 4), renowned
for his fifty years of masking as a Black Indian, came from a Creole-French speaking family from Martinique. His great uncle,
Becate Batiste, was celebrated as founding the first Mardi Gras
Indian tribe in the 1880s—the Creole Wild West. Montana’s
early beadwork style recalls that found on Haitian Rara pants
and tunics from the mid-twentieth century (Fig. 5). According
to Susan Elizabeth Tselos, the motifs of Rara sequin and bead
costumes were inspired by garments worn by the French court
and nobility during the time of Napoleon as well as by vèvè, a
cosmological symbol associated with Vodou spirits (1996:58–65).
Both feature designs that, like a vèvè, radiate out from a central
point but do not form cruciform shapes. As such, they resemble the plaster ceiling medallions and other decorative elements
found in New Orleans Creole architecture, suggesting a historical connection between Haitian and Louisiana Creole aesthetics.
Since, like many Creole men in New Orleans, Tootie Montana
worked as a master builder specializing in the installation of lath
for plasterwork, it is likely that he was inspired by such medallions. In the early 1960s, he began to create three-dimensional
medallion-like patterns that jumped off the surface of his apron.
He formed shapes out of cardboard and covered them with fab-
My Daddy was a latherer. He did the bone structure … the wooden
studs inside the walls. He gave it the bone structure and they covered over it with plaster. My Daddy learned to make his suits from his
trade and I watched him. My Daddy would walk through the French
Quarter every weekend. If he saw some gingerbread work that he
liked on a building, he would take and sketch it and try to include
that in his work. He had a good eye. He would look at magazines of
jewelry and look at it with a magnifying glass. And he would pick up
on intricate designs. He would draw his suits before he made them.4
In addition to, and perhaps underlying, the Caribbean connections, the predominant aesthetic influence on Mardi Gras
Indian suits and performances, and one that numerous scholars
have attempted to decode, is African. Robert Farris Thompson
believed that the use of sequins and beads in Vodou artistry in
Haiti, which influenced Rara tunics and pants, was itself the Creole manifestation of the Kongo tradition of painting small dots
and dashes on their figural sculptures. Thompson asserted that
these “ritual dots” mediate between the living realm of humans
and the spirit world of the dead. In fact, throughout the Caribbean, men dressed as Indians decorate their bodies with dots
and dashes during Carnival (Fig. 7). Therefore, Thompson’s
analysis asserts that stylistic similarities between Haitian Rara
and other Caribbean carnival costumes may stem from a shared
Kongo ancestry that later migrated to New Orleans.
According to Thompson, the Mardi Gras Indians, like New
Orleans jazz, gumbo, Voodoo, and Creole architecture, represent
an amalgamation of Kongo, Mande, and Yoruba-Fon cultures.
For instance, noting the Kongo practice of using feathers as medi-
vol. 46, no. 2 Summer 2013 african arts
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7 Two unnamed men
dressed as “Wild Indians” at
carnival in Grenada, 1998.
Photo by the author
8Unnamed Mardi Gras
Indian, February 1959.
Photo: Harry V. Souchon Sr.
Collection, Courtesy of the
Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane
University
cines, indicating confidence and strength, Thompson implies that
the use of feathers in Mardi Gras Indian suits is a cultural retention from the Kongo that healed the trauma of the middle passage
(1998:25). Analyses such as Thompson’s purposefully emphasize an African connection, even if such a connection cannot be
proven historically, in an attempt to rectify the longstanding and
systematic neglect of African influences in American art by the
Eurocentric art establishment. This approach, while influential,
has also sustained extensive critique by scholars who point out
that ethnic groups in Africa, such as the Yoruba and the Kongo, do
not represent pure cultural categories that were carried unchanged
from Africa to the Americas but are themselves best understood
as mid-nineteenth century colonial inventions that subsumed a
diverse group of people. Ethnicity in Africa itself was constantly
changing, and, according to the historian Gwendolyn Hall, “African cultures were not preserved in a pickled form in the Americas but were subject to the process of creolization,” which varied
according to local histories (2005:169).
Rather than make a direct comparison between the style of
Mardi Gras Indian costuming and African cognates, Joyce Marie
Jackson and Fehintola Mosadomi take a conceptual approach.
They observe that Mardi Gras Indians and Yoruba Egungun
masquerades are both male-dominated institutions that engage
ritual dress, music, and language to create a multimedia spectacle where participants dressed in colorful costumes perform in
public spaces in order to evoke ancestors (2005:158–59). While
these comparisons are certainly valid, one of the primary differences between Mardi Gras Indian suits and African masquerades, such as Egungun, is that very few Indians in New Orleans
actually cover their faces, despite the fact that they refer to their
style of dress as “masking.” This may be explained by a 1781 regulation administered by the Spanish governor and recorded in the
Acts and Deliberations of the Cabildo. The regulation stated that
“because of the great multitude of troops and crews from ships
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(due to the war between Spain and England) and the great number of free Negroes and slaves in the city, the Attorney General
recommends that all kinds of masking and public dancing by the
Negroes be prohibited during the Carnival Season.”5 Throughout the nineteenth century, authorities in fear of slave rebellions
attempted to control the gathering of enslaved people. For example, Africans and Native Americans were allowed to gather at
Congo Square only on Sundays. In fact, the wearing of masks in
New Orleans remains illegal, with exceptions made for Halloween and carnival, although the law is unenforced.
Since the Mardi Gras Indians do not wear masks, the term
“masking” by Black Indians likely refers not to a physical mask
but to the performative nature of costuming—the spiritual
aspect, as it were, which, like masquerading in a West African
context, uses theater, performance, and display to give visible
form to the intangible. In the case of the Black Indians, Big Chief
Darryl Montana best explained the spirituality inherent in their
performances when he told me: “We honor our ancestors and
also the Native Americans who helped our ancestors.”6
In addition to honoring a real or imagined ancestry, the
Mardi Gras Indian suits function to express agency, self-reliance,
and resistance. The Indians’ song, “Got to Sew, Sew, Sew,” dating
back to the early 1900s, captures this spirit of defiance. According to anthropologist David Draper, who transcribed the song
in the early 1970s, the leader sang each of the following lines,
answered by a chorus singing, “Hagalli gotta sew, sew, sew.” The
leader sang:
Up early that morning on Mardi Gras Day.
Oh Flag boy holler: Get the hell out the way!
Oh the Big Chief holler: Get the hell out the way!
Oh, I sew, I gotta sew, all day and I sew all night.
Oh, Chief de White Eagles done shot by!
Oh, if you won’t bow down, get the hell out the way!
It’s a beautiful Indian, hell I know!
Oh, if you won’t bow down, get the hell out the road.
Oh, I sew, I gotta sew all day and I sew all night.
Oh, you won’t help me, when you meet me dead!
If you don’t bow down, I hurt yore head!
I die, kill-a-way!
I’m a Injun boy, get the hell out the way!
Well early in the morning with your war paint on!
I’m bobbling and weaving when I leave home,
I sew, all night long!
You bring me no water, you bring me no ice,
My spy got a hatchet, my flag got a knife.
Goin’ to take my flag ‘way Downtown.
Oh, chak-a-mo feena and gonna lay ‘em down.
I sew all night long!7
While the exact version performed today may differ slightly, its
basic elements remain the same. The leader introduces the hierarchy of the Indian tribe, including the Spy Boy, Flag Boy, and
the leader of a tribe, the Big Chief. In addition, each tribe has a
series of lesser chiefs, referred to by such descriptors as trail chief,
council chief, first chief, second chief, and third chief. Each member’s role is reflected in his costume. The Spy Boy leads the Indians
through the backstreets and is the first to meet members of other
Indian tribes. His costume is usually the lightest of all the Indians,
as it allows him to move quickly through the streets and warn the
Big Chief that another tribe is approaching. The Flag Boy carries
the symbol of his tribe, and uses it to relay signals to the Big Chief.
Tribes also have a Wild Man, who clears the path for the Big Chief,
making certain no one damages his costume.
Historically, rivalries between different Indian tribes sometimes led to violent confrontations, if both tribes refused to
humble themselves and “bow down.” When two tribes met on
the streets, the Big Chiefs approached each other, greeting each
other with a chant that involved rhyming boasts and insults,
which Lipsitz compares to “playing the dozens” (1990:243). The
verse, “My spy got a hatchet, my flag got a knife” was not metaphoric; some Indians carried real hatchets, knives, and guns.
According to the book Gumbo Ya-Ya, by the 1930s, the violence
had ended (Saxon 1988:20). Today, hatchets and guns are decorative, rather than functional, and are covered with beads and
feathers. However, such accouterments continue to mythologize
the violent past of the Black Indians and, as I will later demonstrate, many suits contain pictorial references to violence. Maurice Martinez believes that this violent history explains why there
are fewer women than men performing as Mardi Gras Indians:
9Unnamed Mardi Gras Indians from the Uptown
area of New Orleans, Mardi Gras Day, 1965.
Photo: Joseph Labat
10 Big Chief Bo Dollis of the Wild Magnolia, Mardi
Gras, 1980.
Photo: Michael P. Smith, © The Historic New Orleans
Collection, accession number 2007.0130
This [the Black Indians] is a warrior culture, and in warrior cultures
it’s predominantly men. That’s not to say that women aren’t as equal or
more so …. Black Alice … she carried a pearl hammer pistol in her bra.
She said, “I was the first woman chief.” She said, “I met this Chief from
another tribe and he come talkin’ about humba [an Indian expressing
for bowing down in defeat]. I pulled my pistol out and I shot his crown
right off his head.” She said, “Nobody mess with me after that.”8
An article in The Times Picayune from 1923 entitled “‘Negro
Indians’ Go on Warpath” recounted the violent past of the Indians,
stating that: “two bands of negroes costumed as Indians” engaged
in a bloody gunshot battle, wounding two persons, “one a white
girl.” Following a police chase, “a number of negroes were arrested
after they had been clubbed into submission by the police.” Thus,
vol. 46, no. 2 Summer 2013 african arts
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11 Big Chief Allison “Tootie” Montana of the Yellow
Pocahontas (center) and unnamed family members.
1978.
Photo: Michael P. Smith, © The Historic New Orleans
Collection, accession number 2007.0130
12 Big Chief Darryl Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas, Mardi Gras 2007. Note the © mark on costume
to the left of the lower face.
Photo by the author
in addition to the legendary conflict
between tribes, violence was inflicted upon
them by local authorities. Joseph Roach
interprets the Black Indians, harassed by
police and subject to harsh Jim Crow laws,
as part of the circum-Atlantic world where
memories of the violent diasporic and
genocidal histories of Africa and the Americas were retained in their performances
(1996:192–94).
The battle cry of the Indians to “sew, sew,
sew,” originated as a demand for power
that encouraged personal self-esteem and
group consciousness. African American
men dominated and controlled Mardi Gras
Indians public performances, constructing an elaborate patriarchal hierarchy that
recreated the image, both real and imagined, of heroic Native American warriors
actively resisting domination. Violence
between rival Indian tribes can be seen
as displaced aggression towards the white
majority that reenacted the violence associated with Native American resistance.
In fact, Black Indians, who pointedly omit
depictions of the military defeat of Native
Americans in their beaded patches, sometimes walk a fine line between self-empowerment and the reinforcement of Native
American stereotypes.
Glory Down on the Battlefield:
From the Backstreets to Jazz Fest
(1960s–1980s)
The 1960s were watershed years for
the Civil Rights Movement and a period
of renewed optimism and possibility for
African Americans. In New Orleans, physical violence between Black Indian tribes
declined and, instead, Indians engaged in
non-violent “battles” with the needle and
thread, competing to see who made the
most detailed and original design.
At the same time, Indians began to professionally record their music and play
in music festivals, gaining greater public
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13 Installation view at the New Orleans Museum of
Art, Exhibition “‘He’s the Prettiest’: A Tribute to Big
Chief Allison ‘Tootie’ Montana’s 50 Years of Mardi
Gras Indian Suiting” 1997.
Photo: courtesy of William A. Fagaly
14 Big Chief Darryl Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas stands on the side of mother’s double shotgun
house where his father’s suits are stored, 2009.
Photo by the author
exposure and initiating a new space for performance outside of
Mardi Gras and St. Joseph’s Day. The increased public visibility
of the Mardi Gras Indians from 1960 to 1980 is closely linked
to the history of photographic documentation. The interest in
the Mardi Gras Indians by those outside their neighborhoods
influenced how they saw themselves and, subsequently, how
they represented themselves both within and outside their own
communities. For example, Figure 8 is a photograph of a Mardi
Gras Indian (whose name and tribe are not recorded) taken by
Harry V. Souchon, Sr., a New Orleans native and founder of the
now defunct New Orleans Jazz Museum and former president of
the New Orleans Jazz Club. The attention accorded the Indians
by a prominent white jazz scholar is symptomatic of the outside
world’s growing interest that in turn encouraged Indians to make
increasingly extravagant and individualized suits.
During this period, two distinct neighborhood styles of
Black Indian suits developed: Uptown and Downtown. The
Downtown section of New Orleans, the first area to be settled
by French, Spanish, and Africans, was home to a number of
people whose ancestors would have once been classified as
“free people of color” or “black Creoles.” Many black Creoles
in the Downtown area worked in skilled trades, which led
them to create new styles of beaded patches and crowns. For
example, Downtown Indians eventually developed a new style
of headdress referred to as the mummy crown—a headdress
that radiates horizontally from shoulder to shoulder and is
supported by the head and shoulders of the maskers (see Fig.
11). As its name suggests, this style of crown is very tall and not
very flexible, making it more difficult to move quickly in case
of an encounter with a rival Indian tribe, evidence of the fact
that aesthetic rivalry had replaced violent confrontations.
The Uptown section of New Orleans was created after 1803
when Anglo-Americans from outside of the city settled in New
Orleans. Indians from this area continued to work in the earlier style, perfecting the art of flat pictorial beadwork. This style
also came to characterize Indian tribes from the New Orleans’
Ninth Ward. At some point, Uptown Indians began to make
larger crowns from dyed ostrich feathers; however, reconstructing the precise chronology of these developments is a
challenge. Although Indians were increasingly photographed,
few photographs prior to the 1970s exist in public archives.
Most from this period can be found in private collections, such
as that of Joseph Labat, a prominent African-American doctor
who photographed the Uptown Indians in Figure 9.
The Indians’ reputation for violence stopped Dr. Labat from
becoming involved with them. Rather he took photographs as
Indians passed him in the street without recording their identities.9 By 1970, certain individuals began to gain celebrity in the
city. For example, Big Chief Bo Dollis made a name for himself
when he and his tribe, the Wild Magnolias, collaborated with a
group of New Orleans funk musicians, transforming “the traditional sound of Black Indian chants into an electrified dance
anthem.” This recording was produced and financed by Quint
Davis, the co-founder of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (see Regis this issue). Dollis and others made increasingly
elaborate suits to create a more impressive stage presence (see
Fig. 10). At the same time, even as they crossed into the commercial music scene, Indians, such as Dollis, continued to perform
in their own backstreet communities.
The fact that in the Michael Smith took hundreds of photographs of Indians such as Big Chief Bo Dollis in 1980 (Fig. 10)
reveal how the Mardi Gras Indians caught the attention of outsiders as they were marketed by the city, which increasingly
turned to tourism as an economic strategy. The Mardi Gras Indians fit into the narrative promoted by writers and tourism promoters of New Orleans as a unique and exotic city, linked more
closely to the Caribbean than to the rest of the South. This narrative sentimentalized antebellum New Orleans as a place where
enslaved Africans and a population of free people of color lived
in relative freedom, contributing to a myth of racial harmony.
However, this idealized narrative fails to recognize that African
American music, food, and performance largely emerge out of a
culture of resistance against racial violence and oppression.
vol. 46, no. 2 Summer 2013 african arts
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15 Big Chief Larry Bannock of the Golden Star
Hunters. Super Sunday Uptown, 1996.
Photo: Michael P. Smith, © The Historic New Orleans
Collection, accession number 2007.0130
While Dollis and others were performing and recording their
songs, some Indians, such as Big Chief Allison “Tootie” Montana, believed that the commercialization of Indian street chants
represented a blasphemous disregard of tradition. Shaka Zulu,
a Chief in the Yellow Pocahontas Tribe currently led by Tootie
Montana’s son Big Chief Darryl Montana, recounted that Tootie Montana refused to play at the annual jazz festival because it
desacralized the music:
You are chanting and when you chant, you are conjuring up old spirits. The syncopation and the repetition … you keep doing it over and
over. It’s almost like a ring shout. You do it over and over and over
and over. You start to get tired and all of a sudden, you start to bring
up all these different spirits and you start feeling certain things. So
you are conjuring up all these old chiefs who had to go through getting beat in the head with sticks and all this stuff just to be able to
mask. That’s why Tootie did not want to put music on the stage. He
says it becomes something else.10
Hey Pak-ee-way:
Indians as Afrocentric Artists (1990 to the present)
The 1990s saw increased commoditization of the Mardi Gras
Indians that reverberated in the Indians’ self-representation. It
was during this period that the Montana family gained renown,
with Big Chief Allison “Tootie” Montana crowned the “Chief of
Chiefs,” for helping move Indians away from violent confrontations as much as for his unique artistry. As demonstrated in Figure 11, which dates to 1978, he pushed the aesthetic limit of the
Downtown Indian style, perfecting his signature three-dimensional style at an early date while others continued to work in a
flatter two-dimensional style. Montana’s wife, Joyce, told me that
sewing was a family affair: “It gave us something to do together.
After I would cook dinner we would sit at the table and sew. We
sewed everyday. And the closer it [Mardi Gras] got, the later we
sewed.”11 Unlike other Indians, who often removed their heavy
crown after several hours, Montana wore his crown until the end
of the day, as a badge of honor.
Big Chief Tootie Montana, who often made suits using yellow
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african arts Summer 2013 vol. 46, no. 2
feathers (Fig. 11), the signature color of his tribe, the Yellow Pocahontas, retired from the tribe in 1997. However, in 2004, Tootie
decided to make one last suit, once again from golden colored
feathers and three-dimensional shapes adorned with large white
and gold stones. Montana’s son, Darryl, recreated this design
concept in his 2007 suit, sewn in his father’s style (Fig. 12), which
specifically pays tribute to his father’s craftsmanship. He made
the crown from nine cylinders with pheasant feathers sticking
from the top in order to create an arch under which both he and
his father stand, his father represented by a small figure incorporated into his apron. Inheriting the title of Big Chief in 1997,
Darryl has self-consciously carried on his father’s legacy, representing the idea of family, heritage, and pride of workmanship,
while also carving out a reputation as an artist in his own right.
Allison “Tootie” Montana was the first Mardi Gras Indian featured in a major museum exhibition, mounted by Bill Fagaly,
the curator of African art at the New Orleans Museum of Art
(NOMA) and a long-standing admirer of the Mardi Gras Indians. Rather than navigate the complicated rivalry that exists
among Indian chiefs in the backstreets, Fagaly focused on the
“Chief of Chiefs” Tootie Montana and his fifty years of suiting.
The result was the 1997 exhibition and accompanying catalog
entitled “‘He’s the Prettiest’: A Tribute to Big Chief ‘Tootie’ Montana’s 50 Years of Mardi Gras Indian Suiting” (Fig. 12). According
to Fagaly, Montana’s exhibition was intended to bring attention
to an art form overlooked by many in the art world. In particular, it was meant to honor “all the ‘gangs’ and their chiefs for
the extraordinary work they have done with little or no notice
throughout the years” and validate this uniquely New Orleans
art form with roots in Africa (Fagaly 1997:7).
The NOMA exhibition characterized Montana as an innovator who stretched artistic boundaries and created a new aesthetic, and his innovations are obvious when one compares his
later suits to the early photo of him from the 1940s (Fig. 4). Tootie Montana’s suits specifically appealed to the museum world
because, through their demonstration of artistic individuality,
they reinforce Western definitions of high art. African art exhibitions at European and American museums are dominated
by sculpture and masks and typically ignore a large corpus of
African artistic forms, such as beadwork, textiles, and basketry, which are classified as “low art” or craft. This hierarchical
approach to African art, in which beadwork is classified as craft,
may explain why Indians making flat two-dimensional patches
in the Uptown style were not featured in the two major exhibitions held at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Inevitably, the attention Montana received from those outside
his own community influenced how he saw himself, negotiating his identity as an artist amidst changing attitudes toward the
Mardi Gras Indians. Ten years earlier, Montana had received a
Master Traditional Artist fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1987, which was largely facilitated by the
documentarian Maurice Martinez. According to Joyce Montana,
an official from the NEA encouraged her husband to preserve
his suits as individual works of fine art. Accordingly, he began
to store them in his attic, which, given the hot, humid climate of
New Orleans, was not an ideal venue. When the tenants living
on the other side of their double shotgun house left, he placed
them there, standing upright as if they were on display in a
museum setting (Fig. 14). Therefore, unlike many Indians who
deconstruct their suits each year, in 1997 Montana had a series of
suits preserved and ready for a museum installation.
In the book High Art Down Home, Stuart Plattner wrote that
the difference between craft and high art is that “artists stress
concept and vision, while craftsmen stress physical skill and execution through which the vision is made manifest” (1996:207).
Cultural mediators, such as Maurice Martinez, Bill Fagaly, and
the NEA, contributed to Tootie Montana’s redefinition of himself from craftsman, skilled in using a needle and thread, to artist, whose original works of art are deemed worthy of museum
display. Tootie Montana never forgot the Indian call to “sew all
night long,” continuing to make suits that clearly revealed his
craftsmanship in hard work and intense dedication. At the same
time, he negotiated a somewhat precarious position for himself
in the mainstream art world that proved difficult to maintain in
the long term. Despite his NEA award and exhibition at NOMA,
Montana did not sell his suits to any mainstream American art
museums. Rather he sold one suit to a Ripley’s Believe It or Not
Museum geared to tourists visiting New Orleans. Montana’s suits
remain on display on one side of his shotgun double where his
wife still lives (with no climate control).12
Other Indians also caught the attention of the museum curator
Bill Fagaly who, in the mid-1980s, shocked participants at a local
arts fair by awarding a “best of show” prize to Larry Bannock, Big
Chief of the Uptown tribe called the Golden Star Hunters. At the
time, few considered Indians as artists.13 Larry Bannock, whose
image was captured repeatedly by Michael P. Smith over a period
of twenty years, worked in the Uptown style and created intricately beaded patches, which he layered on one another (Fig. 15).
Bannock constructed feathered and beaded staffs that would be
held by his “second-liners.” He also carried feathered props in his
hands similar to those carried during processions led by social
aid and benevolent societies in New Orleans. His use of these
props allowed him to construct a decorative frame around himself when he marched down the street. By the 1980s, most Uptown
Indians replaced the ribbons they once commonly used to adorn
their cuffs with long beaded patches framed with ostrich feathers (referred to as “wings”), which they could open and close to
reveal the detailed beadwork underneath (see those worn by Big
Chief Bo Dollis in Fig. 10). Aesthetic devices such as these allowed
men to encourage the viewer to engage with this spectacle of display. They could slowly open their costumes or selectively lift their
patches, allowing Indians to control who saw which part of their
suits. Since they could simply refuse to open up their wings or lift
their patches, this gave Indians increasing control over their selfrepresentation (Fig. 16).
16 Member of the Comanche Hunters, Jazz & Heritage Festival, New Orleans, 2010.
Photo by the author
17 Big Chief Nelson Burke of the Red Hawk Hunters, St. Joseph’s Night, 2011.
Photo by the author
18Close-up of patch sewn by Big Chief Nelson
Burke of the Red Hawk Hunters in 1999.
Photo by the author
vol. 46, no. 2 Summer 2013 african arts
| 45
(this page)
19 Victor Harris, The Spirit of Fi-Yi-Yi Mandingo
Warriors.
Photo: Michael P. Smith, © The Historic New Orleans
Collection, accession number 2007.0130
(opposite)
20 Walter Sandifer Jr., Spy Boy of the Creole Wild
West tribe, St. Joseph’s Day, 2011.
Photo by Scott Becker
21 Big Chief Darryl Montana and Big Queen Gina
Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas, Mardi Gras,
2009.
Photo by the author
Many who work in the Uptown style use their patches to connect themselves to the history of Native Americans (Fig. 17).
Some, in particular, depict historically violent confrontations
between Native Americans and white soldiers. Collectively,
they represent a rejection of white economic and social privilege to create an alternative narrative in which, instead of being
defeated, Native Americans are shown as victorious. Figure 18,
for example, shows an individual patch originally created by Big
Chief Nelson Burke of the Red Hawk Hunters in 1999. Since the
patch survived Hurricane Katrina, Burke decided to revive it
in 2007. The patch depicts an Anglo-American solider hanging
from a dead tree, placed there by the two Native American men
who stand before him. Nelson explained the imagery to me:
Thus while Burke’s patch evokes lynching, by reallocating agency
to the historical victim, and at the same time framing the violent
interaction in an indeterminate, and sometimes partly imagined,
historical past, he and other Indians who create such patches do
not threaten the contemporary status quo.
While many of the Mardi Gras Indians engage in cultural
politics indirectly through the use of Native American motifs,
Victor Harris, who started The Spirit of Fi-Yi-Yi and the Mandingo Warriors in 1984, is among the most explicit in acknowledging African inspiration (Fig. 19). In a 2009 lecture at the New
Orleans Museum of Art, Jack Robinson, one of Harris’s designers, concedes that racism made it impossible for African Americans to express their African heritage during Jim Crow:
It’s a story of Native Americans fighting for their land. Back then, the
soldiers came along and took Indian land. They tricked them and
stole their land. The Indians were fighting for their land, so when
they captured one, they would scalp him, kill him, hang him, burn
him and wear their jackets. I am depicting the history, showing the
actual violence.14
We had to maintain ourselves on Mardi Gras day by playing Indian.
But we were really representing our culture so we would not get
ripped up or burnt up or whatever. Some people still pay homage to
the Native American Indians—and we do too—but we also want to
let people know that this culture comes out of Africa—this is a New
Orleans culture and this is part of the gumbo.15
Explicitly violent beaded patches allow Mardi Gras Indians to
express frustrations with Anglo-American society in ways that
otherwise might not be socially acceptable, such as in this revisionist version of a lynching. As previously discussed, in preKatrina New Orleans, the Mardi Gras Indians were typically
marketed as embodying a celebration of New Orleans’ multiethnic history and racial tolerance. However, the myth of New
Orleans’ racial harmony was exposed after the winds and waters
of Hurricane Katrina ripped open the floodgates and revealed
the extent of the underlying racial inequality. Burke, who lived
in the lower Ninth Ward, lost his house and many of his Indian
suits in the flood and moved to Atlanta. This surviving patch
reminds us that the Black Indians emerged out of and continue
to wage, a metaphoric war against the city’s rampant racial, economic, and social inequality. Attributing agency to Native Americans allows African American men to express their frustration
with contemporary racial politics through the guise of the historical conflicts between White settlers and Native Americans.
Harris has moved away from the typical tribal organization
model, choosing instead to have family members and a team
of male designers, who work with him to create his suit each
year, march with him. Instead of second-liners following behind
playing tambourines, the professional musician Wesley Phillips
plays the djembe, making a further connection to Africa. He has
evolved a style of suiting that merges various African influences
to create a pan-African masquerade style (Fig. 19).
Harris almost always wears an actual mask that covers his face,
diminishing his individuality and transforming him into a generalized symbol of Africa. For his 2011 suit (cover), he and his
design team beaded a series of spiders on the collar, representing
Anansi, the trickster spider featured in Ghanaian Ashanti stories
and carried to the southern United States as Aunt Nancy. This
suit, like most of Harris’s costumes, features an elongated facial
mask adorned with a profusion of cowrie shells.
Harris further distinguished himself from other Big Chiefs
when he traded the honorific term Big Chief for the title of “The
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Spirit of Fi Yi Yi” suggesting that he conjures African spirits
through his costume:
Fi Yi Yi is my given spiritual cultural name. Most tribes base everything on native Indians. They have to know their roots and they have
to know that we had a culture before we came to America. We base
ourselves as Mandingo warriors. We are not afraid and we are brave.
We live like warriors and we die as braves.16
Jackson and Mosadomi compare Mardi Gras Indian performances to Egungun masquerades and assert that both “speak to
the deep spirituality embedded in the wearing of a mask and the
summoning of another character, an ancestor or a person or people
revered and admired” (2005:158). In an interview with this author,
Harris asserted that this suit embodied the spirit of Fi Yi Yi:
I work through the spirit that commands me to do this work. I try
to get the projection of Africa within. I imagine being there [Africa],
but it is not anything from books or anything I saw before. I am in
another world trying to finish my suit. That is the spirit inside me.
When I mask I am full of fire. I make everyone feel in the spirit. I am
always on the move.17
Mandigo Warrior drummer Wesley Phillips also explained,
“When Victor puts on a suit and the drums are playing, the suit
takes on a life and an energy. The Spirit of Fi Yi Yi is more than
just Mardi Gras, it is something from the community.”18 His
adoption of African-inspired designs also appeals to academic
conceptions of African art and has caught the attention of the
museum world. For years, Harris displayed many of his suits in
the Backstreet Cultural Museum, which opened in 1999 with the
goal of displaying carnival and parading traditions of working
class African Americans historically excluded from the official
Mardi Gras celebration and relegated to the backstreets. In 2006,
when the Backstreet was closed for repairs, the Ogden Museum
of South Art exhibited Harris’s suits, in a showcase of the Backstreet collection.
Harris has slowly moved into the museum world, though
without a concomitant increase in remuneration. As is the case
with many Indians, he still struggles to buy materials necessary for his suits and has even started a campaign on the website kickstarter.com to raise $3000 to help pay for his 2012 suit.
The economic side of “suiting” is problematic for many Mardi
Gras Indians. For instance, many Indians feel they should have
been compensated for the photographs in Michael P. Smith’s
glossy book of color photographs (see Breunlin and Lewis 2009,
Breunlin this issue). Some Indians have begun to copyright
their suits, but because they are photographed while in the public domain and their suits are viewed legally as costumes rather
than original art works, they have not been successful. For exam-
vol. 46, no. 2 Summer 2013 african arts
| 47
ple, Darryl Montana, son of Tootie Montana and the current Big
Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas, placed a copyright logo on his
2007 suit to protect his image from outside publication. In fact,
Montana told me that if I had not approached him about writing
this article and established a working relationship with him, he
would have turned away from me each time I tried to take a photograph (see Fig. 12).
Unlike Harris, who was trained to work in the Downtown
style, Indians working in the Uptown style may take an Afrocentric approach, but they continue to pay homage to Native
Americans. For example, in 2011, Walter Sandifer, Jr., the Spy Boy
of the Creole Wild West tribe, created a crown that featured an
outline of the continent of Africa (Fig. 20) filled with small iridescent beads in colors associated with Pan-Africanism: green,
yellow, and red. Like most Uptown style Mardi Gras Indian
patches, those beaded by Sandifer featured such Native American imagery as a tepee on his top right shoulder and a Native
American man with braided hair on his upper right arm. However, on his apron he included a kneeling African, reinterpreting
the famous white abolitionist image of a pleading slave originally
created in 1787. As understood by white abolitionists at the time,
it represented an African slave begging for his freedom. In so
doing, it reflected white paternalistic attitudes toward enslaved
Africans. The original image highlights the white abolitionists’
role as liberators, removing any notion of African Americans’
agency as self-liberators. However, on Sandifer’s patch, a muscular Native American man raises his arms above his head ready
to cut the chains of the African man, reinforcing the narrative
widely referenced by the Mardi Gras Indians that Native Americans once hid and supported runaway African slaves.
Sandifer and other New Orleans’ Black Indians manage to
move between neighborhood performances, the museum world,
and jazz festival performances without being reduced to commodities by inventively manipulating and blending various influences from African, Native American, and European cultures.
According to Monica Miller, black dandies in the diaspora had “a
deeply engrained cultural predisposition to exploring hybridity,
syncretism, and displays of conspicuous consumption” that they
carried with them from Africa. These black dandies “understood
intuitively that identity can be performed, that race is a fiction,
and that both are culturally and historically based” (2009:90).
Like the black dandy, contemporary Mardi Gras Indians who
perform in both the backstreet and main street use dress to display self-respect and agency, demonstrating an understanding
of the way in which commoditization influences how others see
them and ultimately how they see themselves.
Conclusion: Darryl Montana and
the Struggle for Artistic Control
Approximately two months after Tootie Montana’s death,
Hurricane Katrina hit the city of New Orleans. After the storm,
fearful that the Indians would not return to their destroyed
neighborhoods, the media declared that the Mardi Gras Indians
were—along with jazz, gumbo, and chicory coffee—one of the
ingredients that made the city of New Orleans distinct. Subsequently, the Mardi Gras Indians have moved even further from
the margin to the center, becoming symbols of the soul and cul-
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ture of New Orleans. Stories about the Mardi Gras Indians have
been featured increasingly in The Times Picayune, New Orleans’
largest newspaper, perhaps propelling the inclusion of the Mardi
Gras Indian Victor Harris in Prospect.1, the city’s first biennial
art exhibition held from November 2008–January 2009.
Big Chief Darryl Montana has also been featured in national
and international exhibitions, including “Site Santa Fe” in 2001,
where he exhibited a suit entitled Judy’s Garden, featuring a
handheld sculptural staff designed by the New Orleans artist
John Scott. Montana markets himself as a fine artist who, while
preserving his famous father’s values of hard work, pride, and
community, is developing a distinct personal style. Accordingly,
he names and carefully preserves each of his suits.
In 2009, Montana created a suit called Mamma’s Hands, where
he carried a staff with the image of two hands beaded onto a
tambourine embedded in the middle (Fig. 21). According to
Montana, this design paid tribute to his mother, as her sewing
abilities contributed to his father’s renown, while her contributions went largely unacknowledged.19 Darryl explained that his
father designed his own suits, made the forms out of cardboard,
and added large stones, but his mother filled in each piece with
hundreds of sequins and seed beads. Around the whole crown
he included small figures of Indians that, according to Darryl,
“represent the different Indian tribes that are the engine that
keeps this tradition going.”20
Big Chief Darryl Montana named the 2007 suit seen in Figure
11 A Requiem for the Chief of Chiefs, demonstrating how he tries
to balance his family ties and community responsibilities with
his desire to be recognized as an individual artist. In connection
with this, Montana explained to me his motives for participating
in art workshops for African American children hosted at Xavier
University:
I am on a mission. I could have been one of the statistics. I changed
my life. My Daddy gave me something that I was able to share with
a child and my mission has been if I don’t get them the dope dealers
are gonna get them …. I am carrying the weight of my position on
my shoulders. I constantly sew from April until carnival. I am always
in the house working alone. Most of the guys involved in this, they
are out there going to parties and stuff and then their suits come up
short. I gave up my life for this and I am not going to let them see
me fail. I don’t belong to myself. I belong to the community and my
daddy belonged to the community.21
Darryl estimated that he spends at least $6000 on materials each year and spends hundreds of hours creating suits that
require extreme attention to detail. In addition to his intricate
three-dimensional beadwork and use of tubular bugle beads,
which are very time-consuming to sew down, like his father, Darryl Montana cuts off the tips of feathers and uses these to dress
up the tip of each full-sized turkey feather that he has custom
dyed. He puts a row of marabou in the middle of the feather and
six smaller tips (three on each side) at the end of each individual
feather so that you do not see the form of the actual feathers and
only notice their overall fluffiness.22 Many Downtown Indians
choose not do this level of work, as it requires extra expense and
time. As a result, Darryl Montana’s suits have become so large
that when he wears them they become slow-moving soft sculpture, clearly works of original and self-conscious artistry. In fact,
he told me that he often turns down offers to perform out of
state, as his suits are too cumbersome and delicate to ship. He
and his wife Sabrina Montana are in the process of building a
museum to permanently house his and his father’s suits, which
are in need of restoration and climate-controlled storage.
Ten months before Mardi Gras, Darryl Montana begins to conceptualize the overall design of his suits. His mother, sister, and
other family members help him bead the small three-dimensional
forms that are the basis of his suit. However, in contrast to the
camaraderie that usually surrounds the creation of a suit, he builds
his crowns himself and does not allow anyone to photograph this
process in order to protect his secrets. His determination to distinguish himself as an artist also corresponds to his desire for selfrepresentation. When Indians move from the backstreets to Main
Street, the danger exists that they will not retain control over their
artistic creations and what was once a symbol of racial identity
and empowerment may be reduced to an ethnic commodity that
symbolizes black New Orleans. At the same time they cannot survive without commodification. As the suits become more elaborate, the cost increases and Indians struggle to find money for next
year’s suit. So the question is, how can Indians move this culture
into the mainstream and still maintain ownership of it?
Notes
Thanks to Bill Fagaly for suggesting this project and
supporting me along the way.
1 In New Orleans, elite white societies, known as
Krewes, dress as faux royalty and ride floats on fixed
parade routes through the city’s wide boulevards. I use
the term “Main Street” in this essay to refer to such
New Orleans white-dominated establishments as public
museums and carnival krewes that largely control the
public display of culture.
2 Interview with Victor Harris, Jan. 7, 2009.
3 Interview with Darryl Montana, Jan. 3, 2012.
4 Interview with Darryl Montana, Jan. 3, 2012.
5 Digest of the Acts and Deliberations of the Cabildo
(Jan. 19, 1781, book 2, page 47). Accessed through the City
Archives at the New Orleans Public Library. Many authors
writing about the Mardi Gras Indians misquote this ordinance. They state that this ordinance forbids free Negroes
and slaves not only from masking but also from wearing
feathers. It is used as evidence that Black Indian celebrations predate the 1880s. However, the original ordinance
does not, in fact, mention feathers and only discusses the
prohibition of masking.
6 Interview with Darryl Montana, Jan. 3, 2012.
7 This is only a small portion of the entire song. The
full transcription can be found in Draper 1973:449–70.
8 Maurice Martinez presentation with the Mardi
Gras Indian tribe Ninth Ward Hunters at the New
Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, May 1, 2010.
9 Interview with Joseph Labat, Jan. 7, 2012.
10 Interview with Shaka Zulu, Aug. 26, 2011.
11 Telephone interview with Joyce Montana, Nov.
29, 2011.
12 Telephone interview with Joyce Montana, Nov.
29, 2011.
13 Interview with William Fagaly, Aug. 24, 2011.
14 Interview with Nelson Harris, Oct. 20, 2011.
15 Jack Robinson, public lecture at the New
Orleans Museum of Art, “Roots of the Fi Yi Yi,” Jan. 14,
2009.
16 Interview with Victor Harris, Jan. 7, 2009.
17 Interview with Victor Harris, Jan. 7, 2009.
18 Wesley Phillips, public lecture at the New
“Each Indian,” Darryl Montana told me, “has his own story.”23
Victor Harris of The Spirit of Fi Yi Yi and the Mandingo Warriors recreates and repossesses Africa, creating a view of Africa
that is both imagined and historic at the same time. Harris follows the example of Tootie Montana to create a new Afrocentric
aesthetic that expresses originality and innovation within a tradition that dates back more than one hundred and thirty years.
Both Harris and Montana have influenced a new generation of
Indians, such as Chief Shaka Zulu, who, like the Montana family, uses bracket-like motifs derived from New Orleans architecture, in addition to African-inspired motifs (see p. 87, this issue).
All of the Indians, whether featured in museum exhibitions, like
Harris and Montana, or, performing at the New Orleans Jazz
& Heritage Festival, like Sandifer and Burke, use their suits to
manifest a dynamic sense of agency and open up a new space for
self-representation. This new space allows them to negotiate the
complex heritage politics of Africa in New Orleans and ensure
that the Mardi Gras Indians survive and thrive in the backstreets
as well as on Main Street.
Cynthia Becker, a New Orleans native, is associate professor in the
Department of History of Art & Architecture at Boston University.
[email protected]
Orleans Museum of Art, “Roots of the Fi Yi Yi,” January
14, 2009.
19 In fact, in a recent film by Lisa Katzman, Tootie’s
Last Suit, she shifts the focus of the representation
of the Mardi Gras Indians from masculinist public
performances that dominated earlier documentaries to
family relations around the production of suits and the
transmission of tradition across generations. Thanks to
Helen Regis for this insight.
20 Interview with Darryl Montana, Jan. 3, 2012.
21 Interview with Darryl Montana, Jan. 3, 2012
22 Interview with Darryl Montana, Jan. 3, 2012.
23 Interview with Darryl Montana, Jan. 3, 2012.
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