My hometown of New Orleans is known for many things: food, jazz, second-line gatherings, conventions, the Saints football team. But my favorite thing about my city is Carnival season, which includes Mardi Gras.
This time of celebration, starting on the feast of the Epiphany and ending on Ash Wednesday, is a festive period for locals in New Orleans and extends throughout the Gulf Coast. I remember when I was younger, waking up early on Mardi Gras to catch the parades in my neighborhood. What I wanted to see most was the Black Masking Indians, more commonly known as Mardi Gras Indians, because the various tribes display their new suits on Mardi Gras morning. But the history of this tradition goes much deeper than Mardi Gras itself and is a story of faith, cultural preservation and resilience.
I remember hearing the echo of the drums, tambourines and chants that flowed underneath the Interstate 10 overpass, which ran through my neighborhood. I was enchanted by them. I remember running toward the colorful feathers in the distance to join the revelry and crowds that surrounded the tribes as they searched the city streets for other tribes to enter into the sacred meeting rituals that go back hundreds of years. It was a dream fulfilled, years later, following Hurricane Katrina, when I became a culture bearer myself by singing, sewing and chanting with the tribes, and eventually donning my own suit and participating in this sacred tradition.
In the living cultural tapestry of New Orleans, few traditions embody resilience and perseverance as vividly as the Black Masking Indians. Known for our hand-sewn suits of intricate beadwork and towering plumes of feathers, Black Masking Indians are far more than a Carnival curiosity. We represent a centuries-long story of survival, dignity and faith—an Afro-Indigenous expression forged in the crucible of enslavement, segregation, poverty and spiritual endurance. When viewed through a Catholic lens, the tradition resonates deeply with themes of suffering and redemption, sacrifice and hope, ritual and resurrection. This culture, which the Black diaspora has seen versions of in Africa and the Caribbean, has been an integral part of my Catholic journey in rebuilding my hometown following the devastation of Katrina in 2005.
Roots in Resistance and Solidarity
The Black Masking Indian tradition traces its origins to the encounters between enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples in colonial Louisiana. As Africans fled bondage, many found refuge among Native tribes who offered protection, knowledge of the land and pathways to freedom. Over time, African Americans in New Orleans honored that solidarity by “masking Indian,” forming tribes named after Native nations or symbolic virtues—Yellow Pocahontas, Wild Magnolias, Wild Tchoupitoulas, Guardians of the Flame.
This honoring was itself an act of resistance. In a city where Black expression was policed and criminalized, Black Masking Indians claimed public space through beauty and ceremony. Masking was not simply performance; it was proclamation. Each bead sewn, each feather placed, testified to a people who refused erasure. Perseverance here was communal and generational: skills passed down, songs taught by ear and codes of respect learned in the streets. This connected with the struggle for self-identity that Black Catholics in the area were trying to create and maintain. I wonder at times if Venerable Mother Henriette Delille, one of the African American Catholics currently on the road to canonization, saw or connected with the Black Masking Indians when they would participate in the gatherings in Congo Square, which was located around the corner from St. Augustine Church, where she co-founded the Sisters of the Holy Family.
The Labor of Love
A single Black Masking Indian suit can take a year or more to complete. Chiefs and queens, as the men and women who participate are called, spend thousands of hours hand-sewing beads into complex tableaux: biblical scenes, African symbols, Native iconography, neighborhood stories. The labor is intense, often done at night after long workdays, sacrificing rest and resources for a moment of public revelation. Much of my free time, when I lived in New Orleans, was spent with fellow culture bearers preparing for Mardi Gras morning.
This discipline echoes Catholic notions of sacrifice and vocation. Like the preparation for Easter following the rigors of Lent, masking demands patience, humility and perseverance. The suit is unveiled on Mardi Gras Day, Super Sunday (when the tribes have a huge parade) or St. Joseph’s Night—moments that feel liturgical in their rhythm. Suffering gives way to splendor; hidden labor blooms into communal joy. Over the years, the struggle has been educating folks that this, along with other Black Masking traditions (including similar groups like the Baby Dolls and Skull and Bones), are sacred.
This is why places like Backstreet Cultural Museum, where I volunteer when I am home, are also sacred. Spaces like these allow culture bearers to tell our story authentically from our perspective. Yes, our cultures are entertaining, but they are not entertainment. The same can be said for Black expressions of the Catholic faith, whether it is our preaching, teaching, song, dance or art. These are gifts to the church as Servant of God Sister Thea Bowman, another Black Catholic on the road to canonization, stated during her address to the U.S. bishops in 1989.
Ritual Time and Sacred Streets
Though not a church rite, Black Masking Indian processions follow a ritual calendar that mirrors Catholic sacred time. Mardi Gras Day itself precedes Ash Wednesday, the threshold between feasting and fasting.
St. Joseph’s Night—March 19—is especially significant. Tribes emerge again, often at dusk. Due to the limiting of Black expression under the Code Noir that once regulated the lives of people of color in the New Orleans area, it was safe for Black Maskers to practice their culture on these days because crowds were in the streets (everyone on Mardi Gras Day and Italians on the Feast of St. Joseph), and Black Maskers could be in the streets as well, engaging in their cultures without fear of punishment.
Altars to St. Joseph are prepared in many homes, laden with food and prayer. When Indians mask on this night, they weave their tradition into the broader Catholic imagination of the city—one where saints walk the streets, the sacred mingles with the everyday, and public devotion is as important as private prayer.
The chants of Black Masking Indians—“Indian Red,” “Shallow Water,” “Two-Way-Pocky-Way”—function as communal prayers. Call-and-response patterns recall African spirituals and the responsorial psalms of Catholic worship. Rhythm binds the group together, aligning breath and step, voice and movement.
Historically, these songs also mediated conflict. Where violence once occurred between tribes, a code evolved: Disputes would be settled through competition in song, dance and visual magnificence. “Who’s the prettiest?” became a nonviolent contest of creativity. This transformation—from conflict to artistry—mirrors the Catholic ethic of reconciliation and peacebuilding, perseverance turned toward communion. Many of these songs and ritual dancing are still practiced on Sunday evenings around the city during various Indian Practices, which are extensions of the gatherings that took place on Sundays in Congo Square centuries ago.
Faith in the Face of Hardship
The resilience of Black Masking Indians is inseparable from the realities of Black life in New Orleans. Hurricanes, economic inequality, mass incarceration and neighborhood disinvestment have all threatened the continuity of the tradition. After Hurricane Katrina, many feared that masking would disappear as communities were scattered and homes destroyed.
Instead, perseverance prevailed. Tribes reassembled, suits were remade, and processions returned—sometimes with fewer resources but greater resolve. This mirrors Catholic theology after catastrophe: lamentation followed by rebuilding, ashes giving way to renewal. The Indians’ return to the streets was a kind of resurrection, a declaration that culture and faith endure even when structures collapse.
One of the most revered Black Masking Indians, and a fellow Black Catholic who was a parishioner at St. Augustine Church, was Big Chief Allison Tootie Montana. As a master plasterer who designed many of the intricate decorations of buildings throughout the city, including St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter, he revolutionized the Black Masking Indian tradition by incorporating these designs into his suit. He had many notable accomplishments in the culture that made him a revered chief, but he will forever be remembered because he died amid a fight for the culture.
In the summer of 2005, a few months before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the Indian Nation would gather in the City Council chambers to decry the harassment we experienced from the New Orleans Police Department during St. Joseph’s Night earlier that year. During his impassioned speech advocating for the culture and documenting his years of harassment from the N.O.P.D. during his years of masking, Big Chief Montana suffered a heart attack and died at the podium in the City Council chamber, which was subsequently dedicated to him. A plaque now hangs there in his honor, and a statue of him stands in Congo Square. His life is reminiscent of the fight that is detailed in Catholic social teaching, which calls all humans to be recognized for the dignity that comes from being a child made in the image and likeness of God.
In fact, the feast of the Epiphany, the start of Carnival season, is also known as “Big Chief Tootie Montana Day” in New Orleans. I used to gather the Indians at his statue and lead a prayer service blessing our drums for the season.
Catholicism in New Orleans has always been embodied—felt in food, music, procession and art. Black Masking Indians, though not formally ecclesial, participate in this sacramental worldview. Their suits are icons: material objects that point beyond themselves to deeper truths. Feathers lift the eye heavenward; beads narrate salvation histories both sacred and secular.
Many Black Masking Indians were raised Catholic, attended Catholic schools and absorbed a theology in which suffering is not meaningless and beauty is a path to God. The streets become a nave, the procession a pilgrimage, the chants a litany. Perseverance is not abstract; it is stitched, worn and walked.
Passing It On
A defining mark of resilience is transmission. Today, young people are being mentored and welcomed into the tradition through sewing circles, school programs and neighborhood practices. Elders teach not only technique but values: respect, patience, nonviolence, pride in heritage. This catechesis-by-culture ensures continuity.
In Catholic terms, this is apostolic succession of a different kind—wisdom handed down so the community may live. Each new masker learns that perseverance is communal: You do not mask alone, and you do not survive alone.
The New Orleans Black Masking Indians stand as a living witness to resilience and perseverance rooted in history, community and faith. Our tradition proclaims that beauty can rise from suffering, that discipline can yield joy and that public ritual can heal private wounds. Seen through a Catholic lens, masking becomes an embodied theology—one that honors ancestors, sanctifies time and insists on hope.
In a world that too often prizes speed over patience and spectacle over substance, the Black Masking Indians remind us that perseverance is slow, costly and luminous. Like the church at its best, they endure by remembering who they are, honoring those who came before and stepping into the future adorned with faith. This is why our sacred saying, “Won’t Bow Down, Don’t Know How!” is something that reminds us to keep pressing on, as our Catholic faith does, in times of struggle toward the light of a better day.
This article appears in March 2026.
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