The New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian phenomenon is part music, part heritage, part ancestry, part revelry, part fashion, and oft misunderstood. Chief Monk Boudreaux is one of the most famous and enduring leaders of that culture and head of the Golden Eagle Mardi Gras Indian tribe. He admitted that he shared those feelings of confusion related to those traditions that he embraced long before he fully grasped them.
 
“My dad used to mask as an Indian,” he recalled. “We would get up at 4 o’clock in the morning, help him make his dress, watch him when he’d leave, stay out there, and wait for him to come back. As I got older, I started wondering why he was doing that. I never asked, but I knew there had to be a reason.
 
“Then I started building up my own Indian suit. I was 12 years old. My dad had stopped, so I went with another tribe. I was chief scout the first year. The second year I was spyboy. It’s a feeling you can’t explain, because it’s something deep inside of you.”
 
Boudreaux noted that his elders never spoke of the history of their traditions. “The older people didn’t talk about it. They were scared that if someone found out they were Indians, they would send them off to the reservations. Mardi Gras day was the only day that you could come out and be who you really were. My grandmother—my mother’s mom—she was on her dying bed. She called mom and said, ‘Tell Joseph not to leave until I get there.’ That’s when she told me we were Choctaw Indians. I was 27 or 28 years old at that time. Then I knew why I was doing it.”
 
Indeed, the history of the Mardi Gras Indian culture in New Orleans is complex, and accounts of its origins are sometimes inconsistent. An affinity shared between Native American and African American people, both of whom were enslaved and persecuted at various times in the city’s history, was clearly a driving force in those origins and the mixing of their cultures. Both ethnic groups also share an appreciation of tradition, and the unique New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian music, costumes, and rituals are a melding of influences from both cultures.
 
Continue reading on Big Chief Monk’s website