[JPL] Mardi Gras Indians struggle to survive

[Jazz Promo Services]

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Mardi Gras Indians struggle to survive


By Howard Reich
Tribune arts critic

December 25, 2006, 7:28 PM CST

NEW ORLEANS -- Though his fingertips throb and his shoulders ache, Big Chief
Darryl Montana won't stop sewing.

He has been at it for months ‹sitting at a table in his compact apartment
outside New Orleans, endlessly pulling thread through cloth, squinting
through high-magnification lenses to stitch beads onto fabric, suffering so
many cuts on his fingers that a couple of them look almost mangled.

He says he's making an Indian suit for February's Mardi Gras, but he knows
he's doing much more: With needle and thread, he's trying to preserve a
culture that is unraveling before his eyes.

For more than 250 years, the "black Indians" of New Orleans have sung the
ancient chants and donned the opulent costumes of a culture unique in the
United States. Dubbed Mardi Gras Indians more than a century ago, they have
nurtured the ancient rituals of Africa and the Caribbean in Louisiana,
merging them with the rites of another marginalized people: Native
Americans.

Post-Katrina, it has become commonplace to lament the decline of New
Orleans' distinctive character. But nothing cuts closer to the soul of this
city's culture‹or the origins of American music‹than the endangered art and
ceremony of the Mardi Gras Indians.

Though little-known to the public at large, because it operates mostly
outside New Orleans' official arts and entertainment districts, black Indian
culture has helped shape the course of American music.

Jazz musicians from Jelly Roll Morton to Wynton Marsalis have evoked their
chants. New Orleans icons such as Dr. John and the Neville Brothers have
performed and popularized their songs. Uncounted bands have covered their
most famous melody, "Iko Iko."

"A large percentage of American popular music, and jazz music, has been
influenced by this root culture," said Donald Harrison, a prominent New
Orleans jazz saxophonist-bandleader and Big Chief of the Guardians of the
Flame tribe. "It's the link for all the music that we hear, that takes us
right back to what was going on in Africa."

The freely improvised singing and circle-dance rituals of the black Indians
predate jazz and, therefore, helped lay the groundwork for a new American
sound. Thanks to the Mardi Gras Indians, as well as the city's brass bands
and second-line parades, America developed a freewheeling, African-inspired
music that differed radically from the strait-laced classical symphonies and
high-flown operas of Europe.

But a Mardi Gras Indian underclass that already was on the decline through
much of the 20th Century has been devastated in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina.

Like other New Orleanians, the black Indians have been scattered across the
country. Yet the Indians face a particular challenge: reclaiming not only
their homes but also their artistic heritage, which is diminishing by the
day.

Montana, chief of the Yellow Pocahontas tribe, is among the few who have
moved back after a post-Katrina exile, hoping to rescue a culture that has
endured tremendous loss‹from the ornate ceremonial suits stolen by the storm
to ephemeral oral traditions dating to Louisiana's colonial past.

"If we don't pass it on, it surely will die off," Montana said.

His fears are echoed by virtually every black Indian willing to discuss the
subject. The tribes are famously reclusive, emerging just a few times a year
to parade in the streets, then vanishing. They say they are struggling just
to stay alive.

"You have to ask yourself: Should I spend $2 on beads or try to buy
something to eat?" said Norman Cook, a member of Creole Wild West, New
Orleans' oldest known tribe.

Such stark choices underscore the tenuous future of this culture.

"If we lose the Indians," said David Freedman, general manager of WWOZ-FM
90.7, New Orleans' leading indigenous-music radio station, "we go from being
a living musical culture to a dead or embalmed musical culture.

"We lose the root."

Two persecuted cultures align

A couple of hundred spectators gathered last February near the corner of
Second and Dryades Streets, a famous Mardi Gras Indian meeting place in
Central City. But none of the Indians was to be seen on this first Mardi
Gras since Katrina.

Then, out of nowhere, the brilliant plumage and enormous headdress of Big
Chief Bo Dollis came into view. Wearing foot-high feathers on his head,
vibrantly beaded patches on his chest, an intricately embroidered apron
across his lap and fantastically bejeweled boots on his feet, Dollis looked
like a mystical figure, half man, half God, his face barely visible inside a
costume that weighed more than 100 pounds.

Dollis was surrounded by a half-dozen Indians in his Wild Magnolias
tribe‹all chanting, singing, dancing, striking drums and shaking their arms.

These tribes have their own lexicon and hierarchy. At the front of the
procession stood the Spy Boy, who looked to see if rival tribes‹or
police‹lurked around the corner. Nearby marched the Wild Man, dramatically
brandishing a spear, to ward off enemies. A bit farther back, the Gang Flag
waved the colors of the tribe, meanwhile keeping a close eye on the chief,
to protect him.

The February return of a few Indians drew cries of celebration from the
crowd. Many had wondered whether the Indians would resurface, or if they
simply had been washed away by the storm.

Still, the afternoon's turnout of tribe members was far smaller than before
the hurricane and positively picayune compared to majestic Indian ceremonies
that shook the streets in the past.

Scholars cannot say exactly how or why a black Indian culture arose in New
Orleans. But a few historical facts shed some light on this improbably
enduring society.

As early as 1729, African slaves joined forces with Natchez Indians in a
revolt against colonial French authorities. The interests of two persecuted
peoples suddenly aligned. Thereafter, black slaves in New Orleans escaped
their captors into the swamps and bayous, aided by Native Americans.

>From the nexus of these two besieged peoples, experts believe, rose the
black Indian culture, which combined the chant, dance and costume rituals of
Native Americans and African-American slaves. Caribbean emigres who arrived
in the 19th Century added to the mix.

"It's African, Native American and Caribbean cultures all coming together in
one stream," said Joyce Marie Jackson, an ethnomusicology professor at
Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. "It's the whole history of New
Orleans, really, expressed in the rituals of these people."

Because New Orleans‹unlike much of the country‹in the 18th Century condoned
interracial marriage, these cultures are merged in blood as well as custom.
Many of the black Indians are of Native American descent.

By 1885, the first known black Indian "gang," Creole Wild West, marched in a
Mardi Gras parade. And a uniquely New Orleans street tradition was born.

"They'd form a ring, and one would get in the center and he'd start his kind
of a Indian dance," Jelly Roll Morton recalled in 1938, during his historic
interviews with Alan Lomax. "And he'd be singing, throwing his head back and
downward, and stooping kinda over and bending his knees, and doing a kind of
a jug dance, I'd call it."

Occasionally, said Morton, fights would break out, "and I have known many
cases where there have been killings in the city of New Orleans with the
Indian bands."

The bloodshed indeed made the black Indians notorious in New Orleans. But
Allison "Tootie" Montana‹Darryl Montana's father and the most celebrated
Indian chief of the 20th Century‹transformed the tradition decades ago. A
metalworker by trade, Tootie Montana created enormous suits of sculptural
dimensions, encouraging his Indian brethren to follow his model and compete,
like him, not with weapons but with needle and thread.

Whoever had the "prettiest" suit, as Montana often said, would be deemed
triumphant.

The fighting among the black Indians indeed ended. But they have
consistently complained of mistreatment at the hands of police. The
harassment dissuaded youngsters from taking up the tradition, say many
Indians, and changing tastes and times didn't help. In recent years, tribes
that decades earlier had included 200 members or more had dwindled to five
or 10.

On March 19, 2005, the Indians began their annual St. Joseph's night parade,
a tradition that follows Mardi Gras by a few weeks but ranks close to it in
importance. Shortly after the pageant began, however, police dispersed the
tribes, leading to a large protest in the City Council in June. With Indians
gathered around him, Tootie Montana condemned the mistreatment, saying "I
want this to stop." He then fell to the ground, dying of a heart attack at
age 82.

Two months later, Hurricane Katrina blew into New Orleans, and an already
embattled culture faced its gravest threat.

Little Walter's ruined legacy

The Indians emerge fleetingly ‹on Mardi Gras day, St. Joseph's night and a
couple of other occasions. They're virtually invisible in this city once
they strip off their extraordinary suits and return to their mostly
minimum-wage jobs as manual laborers, temporary day workers and, in some
instances, craftsmen.

Because of that, no one knows exactly how many tribes were still functioning
in New Orleans when Katrina hit. The black Indians have long operated
underground, in impoverished neighborhoods, mostly outside the view of the
city's power structure.

But longtime observers estimate that about 25 tribes, some with just two or
three members, were functioning at the time of the storm, bringing the Mardi
Gras Indian population to a few hundred, at best. For all the plush beauty
of their suits, the allure of their rituals and the poetry of their
names‹Flaming Arrows, Blackfoot Hunters, Wild Tchoupitoulas, Fi-Yi-Yi‹they
had become an endangered species.

Since the storm, most have not returned.

Creole Wild West is "scattered out everywhere," said Irving "Honey"
Banister, Gang Flag of Creole Wild West, sitting in the mold-ridden New
Orleans home of his mother, Littdell, the tribal queen. "I think I've got a
contact with about six of them, but basically I couldn't even tell you"
where everyone is.

For the past year, he has been working as a garbage man in Baton Rouge. His
mother, who is 71, has been sewing assiduously in preparation for this
coming Mardi Gras, but she grieves for what Creole Wild West has lost.
Flooding that breached the city's levees also ruined decades' worth of the
tribe's suits, materials and memorabilia that had been stored in the Lower
9th Ward home of its chief, Little Walter Cook.

"You could sew for 50 years and never replace it," Littdell Banister said.

Staggering price of tradition

On a recent Sunday, Chief Darryl Montana and his wife, Sabrina, had been
sewing for two days, pausing just twice to step out for cigarettes.

Come Monday morning, Sabrina would go to her job in city government, while
Darryl would sew all day, joined again by Sabrina in the evening. Between
now and Mardi Gras in February, they will sew virtually without
interruption.

They estimate that sewing one suit takes about 5,200 man-hours. (Several
people often work on a single outfit.) And a new suit is required each Mardi
Gras. To wear last year's suit is to invite derision.

Though organizations such as Tipitina's Foundation and the New Orleans Jazz
& Heritage Festival gave feathers and money to many Indians for this past
year's Mardi Gras, the gesture was slight compared to the costs of an entire
suit. The cheapest run about $4,000 in materials; the more expensive top
$14,000.

"Most Indians work in minimum-wage jobs," said Sabrina Montana. "If you're
making $5.15 an hour, and you have a household to support, that's a big
commitment."

Unlike practically any other facet of American music, the art of the Mardi
Gras Indians brings its participants scant income or fame. Though an
occasional tribe, such as the Wild Magnolias, plays concert performances
outside the city, most appear for free on the streets, at great personal
cost.

Their sacrifice earns them a few hours of cultural exultation, then a return
to another year of grinding work with needle in hand.

Yet without these rites, they are anguished.

"The ones who are away, outside of New Orleans, are suffering an identity
crisis," said Jackson, the scholar of Mardi Gras Indian culture.

"In New Orleans, they were a Big Chief or a Gang Flag. In Atlanta or
Houston, they're nobody."

Most of the Indians, though, do not have homes to come back to or enough
money to lease an apartment in a city where rents have skyrocketed since
Katrina.

And no one knows if an age-old New Orleans culture can survive long without
them.

hreich at tribune.com
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune