In an age of corporate domination and the relentless commodification of culture, can and do spaces of uncompromised cultural-resistance coexist within this environment? Is it possible that a civil rights movement could sustain themselves and their communities in the face of overwhelming forces that commodify - and ultimately render ineffective - any authentic attempts at dynamic cultural community (re)production?

In this essay, I offer encouraging responses to these questions by way of an exploration of the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans. The Indians, as they are commonly referred to, are a living and effective tradition. As a community-building entity they are a cyclical civil rights movement rebelling against the established authority of the municipality and declaring themselves exterior to the strictures of modern society. The Indians function instrumentally as a “use value” integral to the communities they inhabit as opposed to anachronistically static commodified cultural relics that are solely valued for commercial appeal and profits (George Lipsitz 234). Their thread of resistance in one part is sustained through orature, the mobilization of vocal expression as an aesthetic conveyance. Orature in this context helps to (re)construct counternarratives that strengthen and sustain some of New Orleans’ African-American communities. These communities are continuously affirmed through collective and cultural memory, by which every new generation of Indians iterates reimagined forms of self-expression.

Background
The Indians elude definitive historical categorization. The most common origins narrative holds that Becate Batiste, a building tradesman of African-American and Choctaw descent, took his gang the Creole Wild West out to parade during the Mardi Gras of 1885. Their appearance happened to coincide with the Cotton Centennial Exposition, better known as The World’s Fair. In some accounts Batiste and his gang’s tradition was directly influenced by Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show that toured through New Orleans in 1884 through 1885 with the Exposition. Regardless of precise chronology it is clear that Batiste and his gang’s emergence is a benchmark in MGI history, however African slave and Native American relationships primarily influence their tradition. Recently, I traveled to New Orleans and visited the Backstreet Cultural Museum in Tremé which houses the most comprehensive collection of Indian suits and regalia. The museum’s proprietor, Sylvester Francis, makes it very clear as soon as a you enter the converted funeral home that the MGI tradition is paying direct respect to Native American tribes that assisted enslaved and escaping blacks as far back as the 18th century. In addition, as a black Carnival tradition, the MGI’s sacramental street theatre undeniably holds ties to Congo Square, the greater diaspora of Caribbean Carnival culture on islands such as Haiti, Trinidad, the Dominican Republic, and ultimately can be traced back to West Africa.

Orature, Collective Memory & Counternarratives
The critical concepts that guide my analysis include call-response coupled with collective memory-and-improvisation and the production of counternarratives. The Indians perform orature through their flow of creative spirit, manifested in street theatre, dance, beadwork, parading, “masking,” sewing and mock battles incubating fellowship. Their total view and expressions of life are performative, as their utterances carry out actions and they create and sustain cultural-collective-memory through their orature.

Through the lens of these specific analytic concepts I deconstruct my primary text, a YouTube video titled “Mardi Gras Indians practicing their chants and calls” of a ring led by Big Chief Darryl Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas Gang. I also include my anecdotal experiences of an informal conversation I had with Sylvester, proprietor of the Backstreet Cultural Museum and documentarian of hundreds of jazz funerals, and my experiences at this year’s uptown Super Sunday (March 17th in A.L. Davis Park).

When I write “civil rights movement” I mean just that, the MGIs are a dynamic and elusive cultural zeitgeist bridging eras and they have operated as a process not so much for one specific end, but for the advancement of the ritual itself. The primary text begins,

I’m Big Chief Daryl, don’t have no fear.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

Got a gun, got a knife, got a razorblade.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

Gonna shoot em’, gonna cut em…

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

Well Spyboy comin’…

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

Gonna’ meet ‘em that day when the mornin’ comes.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

Put on my royal cap, put on my crown.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

Don’t mind my house I’m headin’ uptown.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

Got twenty-four stitches across my chest.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

Don’t fear nobody but the lord and death.

Chief Montana raps these phrases over polyrhythmic handclapping and tambourines used dually as percussive and melodic instruments. It looks to be a hot New Orleans day and at least a dozen or more black males (with the exception of one visible white male and female) are formed in a loose ring celebrating the life of the late Big Queen Chief Barbara.

Another man has his turn then Spyboy Demond “Trigga” Seminole lets out a loud signifying call, implicating through speech, “I Spyboy Demond!” Chief Montana holds his index finger upright and Seminole reciprocates with the same gesture and then Seminole falls silent for a moment as the man who currently holds the stage wraps up his time quickly and then falls back from the inner ring peering over Seminole’s shoulder as Seminole proceeds to take the vocal stage. Even though the man is clearly older than Seminole Indian hierarchy appears to trump societal hierarchies of age as Seminole steps in front of the man dismissively and states, “C’mon man I’m an Indian man.” Seminole begins,

If you don’t know I masked that day.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

I masked that day and had to go away.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

I Spyboy Demond in your company.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

Well way uptown on Eagle and Pine.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

I wore my suit and I changed your mind.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

I masked that mornin’ where they all could [feel or see].

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

…“Tootie” Montana on that day.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

After Spyboy Demond says his piece Montana retakes the vocal stage while still keeping time on his tambourine. Montana responds,

I heard, I heard what you say [drawing out the coupled vowels in the first “heard” and stretching them out with elision]

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

Gonna’ have some fun…

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

I’ll swim the ocean and not get wet.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

I’ll go to’ hell befo’ I sweat.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

Yeah! Spyboy coming and Flagboy too.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

Gonna meet ‘em that mornin’ to take our due.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

All the way up on Eagle and Pine.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

And a gang of them Indians, put it on their mind.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me.

Chief Montana speaks; Spyboy Demond listens and creates from something said in Montana’s narrative. Spyboy Demond speaks; Chief Montana listens and then responds, speaking to facets of Spyboy Demond’s narrative. They improvise, collectively inventing individual counter-narratives through repetition that restores the impetus to create more narratives. Through the Indian songs and musical interactions I witnessed, everyone contributes something: tambourining, calls, hollers, dancing, handclapping, or to the refrain. Most, if not all, individuals involved in these instances are engaged in multiple simultaneous discourse, basically doing at least two things at once. Through the interplay of rhythmic (mnemonic) patterns this shared cultural memory amongst the ring can serve multiple purposes and could be interpreted multiple ways, but the texts and my personal observations have led me to deduce that a clear wealth of cultural fortification and cultural perpetuation is being enacted. This is an old tradition reaching back before America was America as we know it, and while it more than likely did not exist in its present state, the Indians nevertheless have preserved what can only be superficially described as an unparalleled spirit of courage in the face of what some might consider insurmountable odds: First, the origins of a slave society, and second, a hollow emancipation that lead to a severe Jim Crow era and then culminated with a bloody civil rights movement in which African-Americans lost two of their most powerful and effective leaders in Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. In spite of that, the Indians are using and vocally mobilizing what is relevant to the present and immediate future in anticipation of an upcoming or present struggle, proactive instead of reactive, all the while making gestures to undergird community spirit.

Whoops, calls and cries are heard emanating from the ring while each man raps. These sonic gestures are not reminiscent of stereotypical Indian calls one would hear emanating from adolescents’ anachronistic games of cowboys and Indians. Rather, they are powerful almost guttural cries, not shrill, but with more of an alto sonic texture. It is not a contest of who is the loudest, but rather a very personal and deeply coded communicative tradition indicative of one’s place in the Indian community. I recently observed two elderly men not suited on Super Sunday greet one-another: one with tambourine while the other called out verses in-between the claps and rattle of the tambourines’ metal disks. The vocalist constructs his narrative and the tambourine answers with percussion and jingles. The interaction evidences that the tambourine and verses do not exist autonomously, but rather through collaboration. The man constructing the narrative shakes his right hand back and forth pointing at the sky and says “On Mardi Gras morning I’ll kill em’ dead…” as the man with the tambourine stoops ever so slightly, answering each short verse with a call/response, clap and shake of the tambourine. Theirs is a richly coded communicative medium relayed and understood in one part through a kinesthetic awareness and the other as an accumulation of oral history expressed through music, agonistic counter-narratives, dance, street theater, “masking” and beadwork. What is evidenced by this brief interaction is the depth of knowledge contained in this communicative intermediary of orature. Joseph Roach expands on these sentiments when he writes, “knowledge of such memories comes more readily to the observer-participant, who has danced the dance or joined the procession, than it does to the reader” (48). These men are not regurgitating passages or reciting from a literate state of mind rather they are supra-historical regenerating “the living enactments of memory through orature.” (Roach 50).

Conclusions & Implications
What the Mardi Gras Indians have shown me is that if we lay aside our preconceived notions of categorization, place, race and ethnicities and just listen for a moment, amazingly everything begins to connect. The accumulation of a thousand written studies could not possibly relay the history, depth and soul of one ring’s rendition of Shallow Water, To-wa-bak-a-way, My Indian Red or Shoo Fly. As we listen to Louis Armstrong, Lightnin’ Hopkins, “Fats” Domino, Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin, John Boutée, Afrika Bambaataa, Juvenile and the Underground Kingz I believe we can hear the vocabulary of an existence. The torch of struggle, triumph and pride carried by the Indians and expressed in their orature is inarticulable and ethereal, yet a rock-solid manifestation of something supra-American, something extra-hegemonic. The Mardi Gras Indians are an integral vein of the underlying foundation of culture that sustains New Orleans and their music is an ever-evolving principal element of one of the greatest cultural contributions America offers to the world, the African-American musical tradition.

Works Cited
Lipsitz, George. “Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Print.

Mardi Gras Indians practicing their chants and calls! User. onenawlins. YouTube. Web. 19 March 2013.

Roach, Joseph. “Culture and Performance in the Circum-Atlantic World.” Performativity and Performance. Ed. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. New York: Routledge, 1995. 45-63. Print.

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