The Mardi Gras Indians (also known as Black Masking Indians or Black Maskers) are Black American Carnival revelers in New Orleans, Louisiana, known for their elaborate suits and participation in Mardi Gras. The Mardi Gras Indians subculture emerged during the late 1800s, founded by Becate Batiste during segregation as a blend of Black American and Native American cultural practices. The Mardi Gras Indians' tradition is created in New Orleans by Black Americans, and is a Creole and Black American artform exclusive to New Orleans.
The Mardi Gras Indian tradition developed as a form of cultural resistance when Black Americans were not allowed to partake in Mardi Gras celebrations in certain areas and as a way to pay homage to Native Americans who assisted Black Americans by taking them into tribes due to them being runaway slaves. Black people could not gather in public or wear masks. Their aesthetic serves as an expression of their culture, creativity, and Black American heritage. The tradition of "masking" derives from the Native American customs and practices in which an individual interacts with other tribes and chiefs. Mardi Gras Indians mask as the Native American allies who shielded their ancestors during slavery; some suits members incorporate depictions of orisha spirits from the Yoruba religion, or as spirits of the dead, such as the Skull and Bones gangs, though not a Mardi Gras Indian tribe. Mardi Gras Indians' suits (regalia) and performances provide commentary on social justice issues, political liberation, and transformation. Their ceremonial purposes include celebrations, pageantry, and community and tribal solidarity.
Mardi Gras Indians describe themselves by "tribes" or "gangs", which are a reflection of the Native American tribes they mask as. Tribes take their names from street names, ancestry and important cultural figures. There are more than 40 active tribes, which range in size from half a dozen to several dozen members. Groups are largely independent, but a pair of umbrella organizations loosely coordinates the Uptown Indians and the Downtown Indians. Their suits are displayed in museums in Louisiana and the Smithsonian. The complex designs of these suits are unique to the Mardi Gras Indian artistic community.
In addition to Mardi Gras Day, many of the tribes also parade on Saint Joseph's Day (March 19) and the Sunday nearest to Saint Joseph's Day ("Super Sunday"). Traditionally, these were the only times Mardi Gras Indians were seen in public in full regalia. The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival began the practice of hiring tribes to appear at the Festival as well. In recent years, it has become more common to see Mardi Gras Indians at other festivals and parades in the city. According to Joyce Marie Jackson of Tulane University, the Mardi Gras Indians' fusion of American Indian and West African motifs and music creates "a folk ritual and street theater unique to New Orleans".
History
Mardi Gras Indians have been practicing their traditions in New Orleans since at least the 18th century. The city of New Orleans was founded by the French in 1718, on land inhabited by the Chitimacha Tribe, and within the first decade 5,000 enslaved Africans were trafficked to the colony. The West and Central African ethnic groups taken to Louisiana during the transatlantic slave trade were largely from Bambara, Gambian, Akan, and Kongo peoples. From 1719 to 1743, the largest group came from Senegambia, and the second largest group came from the Kingdom of Kongo. These ethnic groups influenced the culture of Louisiana in food, music, language, religion, and decorative aesthetics. French slaveholders allowed enslaved and free Black people to congregate on Sunday afternoons at Congo Square, where they performed music and religious practices.
New Orleans is known for its Creole heritage, with traditions coming from Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans. A mixed-race population of free people of color contributed to the history and culture of Mardi Gras in the city. The culture of enslaved Africans fused with Afro-Caribbean, Native American and European cultures that syncretized at Congo Square and was practiced during Mardi Gras. The Mardi Gras Indian tradition developed from early encounters between the region's Indigenous (likely Chitimacha) and Black communities. Most of the enslaved people in Louisiana were Black, but 20% of enslaved people were either Native or mixed-race Afro-Indigenous people before abolition.
Black–Indigenous alliances
When enslaved Africans escaped, they encountered Indigenous peoples of Louisiana who shared skills and resources with them. New Orleans was surrounded by swamps, bayous, and rivers where a number of maroon settlements formed. In Louisiana, the Underground Railroad went southward to the maroon camps because the northern free territories and Canada were too far away. These maroon camps attacked whites, stole cattle from nearby farms for food, and freed or absorbed other enslaved people. The maroons lived in huts and grew their own corn, squash, rice, and herbs. African culture thrived in maroon communities, and Native Americans often helped them by providing food and weapons so they could defend themselves from slave catchers and other whites.
In colonial Louisiana, there was a settlement of armed maroons and Indigenous peoples known as Natanapalle. In such spaces, freed and escaped Africans adapted some of the culture of Native Americans. Whites in Louisiana feared an alliance of Africans and Indigenous people.
In 1729, during the Natchez Revolt, 280 enslaved Africans joined forces with Natchez people to prevent French colonists from taking Indigenous land for tobacco production. The Natchez killed almost all of the 150 Frenchmen at Fort Rosalie; only about 20 managed to escape, some fleeing to New Orleans. The Natchez spared the enslaved Africans, perhaps due to a sense of affinity between the groups. Some slaves joined the Natchez, while others took the opportunity to escape to freedom.
Until the mid-1760s, maroon colonies lined the shores of Lake Borgne, just downriver from New Orleans. The maroons controlled many of the canals and back-country passages from Lake Pontchartrain to the Gulf of Mexico, including the Rigolets. The San Malo community was a long-thriving autonomous community. These settlements were eventually eradicated by Spanish militia led by Francisco Bouligny. Despite this, people who escaped enslavement in ante-bellum America continued to find refuge and freedom in the areas around New Orleans.
The first Mardi Gras
The first recorded slave dances on plantations in Louisiana were recorded by the French in 1732. Archival records documented the first enslaved Africans apparently dressing as Indigenous people in a celebratory dance called Mardi Gras in 1746. In 1771, free men of color held Mardi Gras in maroon camps and in the city's back areas. Some of these men wore their masks to balls, causing the Spanish administration to prohibit Black people from attending the balls or from wearing masks and feathers. As a result, Black revelers confined their parades and celebrations to Congo Square and Black neighborhoods. Author and photographer Michael P. Smith quotes Brassea as stating: "By 1781, under Spanish rule, the attorney general warned the City Commission of problems arising from 'a great number of free negroes and slaves who, with the pretext of the Carnival season, mask and mix in bands passing through the streets looking for the dance-halls.'" In 1804 and 1813, a German American and Swiss traveler saw Black men dressed in "oriental" and Native American attire wearing Turkish turbans of various colors.
In the late 18th century, Spanish officials increased immigration and trade in the lower Mississippi valley by granting French merchants permission to transport enslaved people from Saint-Domingue and other Caribbean islands. American merchants in New Orleans invested in capital by transporting enslaved people through the port from the colonies of the British West Indies, such as Jamaica. After the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, the port of New Orleans became the center of the slave trade in the United States before the American Civil War. Enslaved people were brought from other southern states to supply the demand for labor on the plantations. In addition, during and after the Haitian Revolution, enslavers fled the island of Hispaniola, bringing their enslaved Africans with them to New Orleans.
In 1810, White Creoles, free Mixed Race Creoles and their enslaved came to New Orleans from Saint Domingue now known as Haiti, thus doubling the local enslaved population and tripling the population of free people of color. The port received immigrants from Cuba, Germany, Ireland, and the rest of Europe and the Caribbean that migrated all throughout the United States. Carnival culture, stemming from European lent customs was seen to exist not just in New Orleans, but also in Haiti, Jamaica and other parts of the West Indies these festival traditions have been customary in certain Black countries and local communities. Jonkonnu, Rara, Gaga, Canboulet, and others are festival traditions in the West Indies.
Exclusion and subversion
In 1857, The Pickwick Club, an all-white gentleman's club, formed the Mystick Krewe of Comus, a white-only carnival krewe. They were soon followed by similar all-white, men-only krewes across the city. These groups often wore blackface and redface, and took part in public celebrations as well as private balls. Black people were initially forbidden from wearing masks during carnival; in response, groups of young Black men used "war paint" to hide their identities instead. After the state legislature allowed masking "from sunrise to sunset", Black people began masking according to the style of Native American ceremonies.
By the 1880s, Becate Batiste, a young creole man of African, French and Choctaw heritage formed the Creole Wild West, in Seventh Ward. Others soon formed their own "tribes". Their visual style, drawing from African and Indigenous traditions, served to satirize and invert the racist masquerades of white krewes. It also allowed Black people, whose African culture had been suppressed by slave laws and the Code Noir, to practice their traditions openly.
Hurricane Katrina In 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed African-American neighborhoods in New Orleans. Tremé is considered to be the oldest Black neighborhood in America and during post-Katrina continues to experience gentrification. From the 18th and 19th centuries, free Black people owned businesses and mixed with Louisiana Creoles at Tremé. It is estimated that Black people owned eighty percent of the neighborhood. After Hurricane Katrina passed through, over 1,000 Black households along Clairborne Avenue were wiped-out and replaced with 120 white households. According to research from author Shearon Roberts, the changing of racial demographics in post-Katrina affects the continuation of culture for some Black residents. Occupation by white residents of spaces that were once Black-owned and where Black masking and cultural traditions were perpetuated resulted in three consequences: "...economic loss through appropriation, increased forms of criminalization, and the rupturing of Black safe communal spaces." Black New Orleanians experience cultural intrusion and appropriation from outsiders that affects the meaning and history of their traditions.
Culture