Since the 1880s, members of New Orleans' Black Masking Indians have spent up to a year, every year, hand-crafting spectacular suits to parade on Mardi Gras. The tradition blends Native American designs with West African masquerade ceremonies in celebrations meant to honor both.

With up to 150 pounds of beads, rhinestones, ostrich plumes, and sequins, the suits can cost thousands of dollars in materials alone. They are engineered for spectacle; on Mardi Gras, Super Sunday, and St. Joseph's Day, different tribes meet in ritualized encounters—Big Chiefs ceremoniously boast about whose suit is “prettier,” and the streets fill with chanted call-and-response songs that blend African rhythms and Creole dialects.

But the parades are only the surface. Onlookers don’t see the year of work designing and sewing a new suit from scratch, a process many participants describe as meditative. What reads as flamboyance to tourists is, for practitioners, a form of incremental, physically intimate prayer made visible. The suits’ beaded panels often carry sacred and specific imagery: Ghanaian Adinkra symbols, Yoruba orishas, ancestors stolen into slavery, or contemporary victims of racial violence.

When the suit is finally worn, the body disappears beneath its weight and a ceremonial identity emerges. Ordinary individuals only become Big Chiefs or Big Queens when masked; many describe the experience as being animated by ancestral presence, guided by something larger than themselves. The spectacle may be loud, but at its core it's devotional. And after a year of quiet work, the figure steps boldly into the street.

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Links:

• Photos: Mardi Gras Indians unveil their 2024 suits, by Carlie Kollath Wells, AXIOS New Orleans

  
  

• Photos: Mardi Gras Indian Suits - nola.com 

  
  

• Photos: Mardi Gras Indians - Pinterest

  
  

• Mystery in Motion: African American Masking and Spirituality in Mardi Gras, Louisiana State Museum online exhibition (2021)

  
  

• “What You Should Know About the Mardi Gras Indians,” by Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, Smithsonian Magazine, February 21, 2023

  
  

• “Killing ‘em Dead with Needle and Thread: A Brief History of Mardi Gras Indians,” by Kim Welsh, The French Quarterly Magazine, February 5, 2019

  
  

• Mardi Gras Indians - Wikipedia

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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