‘All Hail the Queen’: Cultural Bearing, Civic Engagement, and the Mardi Gras Indian Queens

I was born a Queen, sweetie; my momma was a Queen, I come from a Queen.

– Kelly Ann Pearson

I call on all Grand Mothers
everywhere
on the planet
to rise
and take your place
in the leadership
of the world.

– Alice Walker, “Calling All Grand Mothers”

With her declaration of hereditary royalty, Kelly Ann Pearson lays claim to the eminence of Black women. She is the Big Queen of the Creole Osceola tribe of the famed Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans, asserting a status determined by her mother’s legacy as well as by her role. Sometimes called Black Indians, the Mardi Gras Indians are African Americans who mask (parade) in New Orleans during Carnival, wearing elaborate handmade suits of beads and feathers that they design anew each year. ¹ Dating back to the mid- to late nineteenth-century, the practice is deeply rooted in African traditions of dance and music – a survivalism that emerged in part in response to the experiences of slavery and subsequent segregation in the United States and the Caribbean. Contemporary participants say the tradition and its nomenclature pay homage to the Indigenous peoples who assisted and welcomed maroons into their tribes, as well as to their African ancestors. It persists because it has proved to be a potent form of cultural preservation. Central, but often unrecognized, are the women of this tradition, the Queens, serving in the only role allotted to women. For Queen Kelly, the title is a birthright and the essence of her being: the fullness of who she is and was from birth. For the women in the Mardi Gras Indian culture, the title of Queen is a rejection of the limited roles for Black women in American society, an embrace of a position that values Black womanhood, and a quiet insistence of their importance in a tradition designed to celebrate Black men. They see their work, as culture bearers and othermothers, as central to the community’s survival, for by maintaining their culture, the Queens maintain their humanity and peoplehood.  

Mardi Gras Indian culture reflects Black peoples’ attempts not only to resist the psychic brutality of dehumanization and marginalization, but also to create structures for individual and community development beyond the social, economic, and political confines imposed by whites. The original Carnival Indians, who emerged in post-Reconstruction America, challenged white society’s limitations and behavioral expectations of Black men. Masking Indian became one way for them to escape “the conventional and often highly restrictive boundaries of their fixed cultural identity based in … race.” ² Some Indians, like the Big Chief of the Creole Wild West, Lil Walter Cook, who claims Choctaw heritage through his mother’s family, have contended that the tradition dates back to the early 1800s and reflects the intermarriage and intercultural exchange that existed between Blacks and American Indians. ³ Some scholars argue that the depictions of American Indians were adopted from the representations of Plains tribes in the Buffalo Bill Wild West shows that came to the city. ⁴ For the Indians, donning the attire of the Plains tribes is understood as a way to pay homage to the American Indians who assisted escaped slaves. Masking Indian also celebrates the valor of a people who, like Blacks, fought the genocide and cultural oppression inflicted by the American government. They challenged the limits on assertions of Black masculinity by presenting themselves as openly defiant of white culture and normative Black behavior. Then, and now, the Indians provide working-class Blacks with positions of leadership and authority in the community, along with the dignity and respect that were (and continue to be) elusive in mainstream society. The Mardi Gras tradition challenges the racism and segregation of southern American life as well as Blacks’ relegation to an inferior status. The spaces the Indians occupy are their spaces. Whether it be uptown, downtown, or backatown, these are the spaces that they claim, the boundaries of their rule. Yet the respect they have transcends neighborhoods as they collectively represent the racial pride of Black New Orleanians.

The Mardi Gras Indians have a clearly delineated hierarchical and patriarchal structure. Each tribe is headed by a chief, distinguished for his charisma, artistry, and leadership. After spending an entire year designing and sewing new suits, the chiefs lead their followers through their neighborhoods during Carnival in search of other tribes for ritual face-offs to determine which suit and song qualify the chief as “the prettiest.” The Big Chiefs are escorted, honored, and protected by males with precise roles and titles such as spy boy, flag boy, and wild man, who dance, sing, and chant. Usually by the chief’s side is a Queen. Sometimes the chief’s wife, but not always, the Queen plays a vital role in helping the chief and other participants in the intensive preparation for Carnival season and serves year-round as a community leader. In academic as well as in popular works, however, the Queens have received scant attention. Their role is typically mentioned only in passing, as an enhancement to the beauty of the chief. The dichotomy between the Queens’ importance and their recognition was apparent to students from The Ohio State University’s Newark campus who interviewed chiefs and Queens in 2014-2015, continuing a film project begun in 2012 in collaboration with the Mardi Gras Indian Council (MGIC). In the initial project, students captured the voices of the legendary Big Chiefs in a short documentary, Spirit Leads My Needle. The five students who traveled to New Orleans in 2014-2015 asked to interview Queens and created a film focused on their role, It’s Your Glory: The Big Queens of Carnival, nominated for a Suncoast Regional Emmy in 2016.

This essay draws on those interviews as well as additional interviews by The Ohio State University at Newark faculty in the years since to provide insight into the role of the Mardi Gras Indian Queen – a role often downplayed, even by the Queens themselves. In many respects, the Mardi Gras Indian Queens are simply doing what Black women do – taking care of their families and communities without need for recognition – providing essential material and emotional support for community and cultural survival. Within this male-dominated culture, the Queens have created a space to affirm their sisterhood and to formalize the generations-old practice of othermothering that has continually nurtured generations of Blacks who are able not only to survive the racism of American society, but also to thrive and pass on cultural traditions. They are culture bearers for the Mardi Gras Indians, their African ancestors, and Black New Orleanians. In emphasizing sisterhood, the need for unity among Blacks, and the centrality of women in bettering their community, they are drawing upon ideas that have guided Black women for generations and doing so with the grace and dignity of royalty.

“The Queen don’t bow down”: Women’s Empowerment in a Patriarchal Culture

Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Mardi Gras Indians have received long-overdue recognition and respect. This is in part because of the heightened media attention and the post-storm re-invigoration of the city’s unique culture and art. One could argue that the little attention given to the Queens has reflected and reinforced the invisibility that Black women typically experience. The Queens are reflective of a generations-old struggle Black women have faced with respect to supporting Black men at the expense of their own visibility in order to demonstrate racial solidarity and in support of Black manhood. The Mardi Gras Indians’ focus is a masculine one, and the Queens respect the necessity of this space that was created to articulate strong, Black manhood in response to societal attempts to control Black bodies in post-Reconstruction America. This focus on Black men, however, oftentimes obscures the severity of the racialized and sexualized brutality Black women have faced and their need to assert Black womanhood that is not defined by Black or white patriarchal ideologies and expectations. Nevertheless, Black women continue to support these spaces where Black men can perform mainstream gender roles. Civil rights activist Victoria Gray explains this phenomenon within the context of the mid-twentieth-century Black freedom movement:

In our community, we wanted that man [in a leadership position] wherever there was an opportunity for him to be in authority. We wanted him to be there. We wanted him to be there. We wanted him to be there. We wanted whenever, wherever it was possible to put that man in some kind of position of authority or leadership. We wanted him there.…This was our husband, this was our son, this was our brother, this was our lover. We wanted him there whenever there was an opportunity for this to happen and we would support him in whatever way that we could or that he would allow us. Our men have had a horrible existence in society, always.… Any time there is an opportunity for the black man in the community to be in that leadership role, the community wants him there.… Because there are just so few places historically where the Black male could have any authority, if you will.…Where that was possible, the community supported that. ⁵

This perspective is evident among the Mardi Gras Indian Queens. “It’s for our men. They need this,” Queen Rukiya Brown of the Creole Wild West tribe states. “They need so many things. They need jobs. And I think this is another way or outlet for stress, and them being somebody. Masking and pretending – you’re out of that other person in that one day. You’re a chief.” ⁶

Despite the hyper-masculinity of the tradition, Queens understand their centrality and necessity to the community, as did civil rights activists and earlier generations of Black women. They know that the public deference to male leadership does not accurately reflect their contributions. Queen Cherice Harrison-Nelson, of the Guardians of the Flame, sheds light on why they make this self-conscious decision to support Black men by acquiescing to this secondary position:

The women in the tradition, we struggle to have a voice. I do not battle publicly, but privately we all know we have power. The public face of females may appear subservient and passive. Personally, I am tolerant of that public image. This is a tradition led and dominated by strong African American men. It is not my function to publicly castrate our men to promote a politically correct ideal for others…. Many Chiefs … told me basically what my father said to me, “You are mere embellishment. If the chief is pretty, he’s prettier with a queen standing next to him.” And how do you fight that? You fight that by working behind the scenes collectively with other queens and young female participants to have a true voice in the private closed confines of the tradition, as opposed to in open public places. ⁷

And the Queens have done just that. Within this male-dominated culture, the Queens have created a space to affirm their sisterhood and to formalize the practice of othermothering that has continually birthed generations of Blacks who are able not only to survive the racism of American society, but also to thrive and pass on cultural traditions.

Thus, the Queens offer a tangible representation of resplendence, distinct from the mythology associated with Marie Laveau, often described as a “Voodoo Queen” or priestess in reference to her role as a religious leader. ⁸ The Mardi Gras Indian Queens’ power is grounded in respect earned for their artistry and leadership within the community. Their role counters the exclusion of Black women from the conventional images of Queenship, tapping into an African tradition that values women’s roles in the community and the power of the feminine divine. They have redefined Queenship to embody agency and clout. When asked if the Mardi Gras Indians would exist without Queens, Queen Kelly responded, “that’s like asking how the world would be without women … It wouldn’t be.” ⁹ Whether in making suits or taking over household duties so men can do so, women’s efforts are essential. In a group interview, Queens explain that there would be no Mardi Gras Indian tradition without the women:

Queen Ausettua Amor Amenkum: … It’s a lot of women in the background whose sewing that get those men out there. It is impossible for you to sew your own suit by yourself– now, you can, if you start like the evening after Mardi Gras and don’t have a job and no children and no other responsibilities in life. 24/7.

Queen Kelly: But you can still not even sew but make everything able for him to do what he gotta do to sew.

Queen Ausettua: But there so many other things you have to do to prepare him to be able to sew like that. It wouldn’t happen because women [are] the backbone of the whole tradition, the whole culture, because you gotta be able to eat, you gotta be able to sleep, your clothes, while he’s focusing on that … it wouldn’t be without us. ¹⁰

Women create the opportunities for men to participate. Queen Cherice notes that “very few men … would make it to the community in the beautiful ceremonial attire without a female putting their hands on their suit or being involved if only to encourage them and say ‘yeah you can do it, you’re beautiful’; we have our hands in it.” ¹¹ The hand-sewn suits, created with thousands of dollars’ worth of beads and feathers, are designed anew each year, a laborious and often a collective project. Without help from families and friends, for these working-class individuals, the task would be impossible.

The Queens have a strong sense of their importance, despite often not receiving appropriate acknowledgement for their contributions. Queen Michelle Hammothe of the Shining Star Hunters described a practice that captures this: “The chief run the gang, but there’s a saying, when they say ‘humba,’ humba means bow down. We say ‘we make no humba’; we don’t bow down. The chief call ‘humba’; the gang bow down. Everybody but the Queen. The Queen don’t bow down.” ¹² Like the title itself, the nonparallel structure of which signifies that a feminized version of the masculine “chief” would be an inadequate representation of the women, the Queens transcend the patriarchal confines of the tradition.

Sisters, Aunties, and Queen Mothers: Mobilizing Women’s Power

In 1985, a group of chiefs founded the Mardi Gras Indian Council to unite against police brutality and harassment, preserve the culture, and build community. No such organization existed for women until 2010, when Laurita “Rita” Dollis, Big Queen of the Wild Magnolias, created the nonprofit Queens of the Nation council. With this structure, the Queens articulate and implement their visions of being a Mardi Gras Indian and actualize both feminist resistance and racial pride within and for their community.

Dollis’ organization promotes unity and sisterhood among the Queens and is a vehicle for caretaking in the community. It has afforded its thirty or so members, from different parts of the city, the opportunity to establish a support system. Queen Mary Kay Stevenson of the Wild Tchoupitoulus states, “Queens have gotten to the point where we have a bond, we’re connected, we know each other now, we’re more as one. Before the last five years, separately, simply, because if you don’t have no identity, you don’t have no structure. So everybody was just out there. You knew of other Queens, but you didn’t know of each other as one. Now we know each other as one.” ¹³

Participation in this sisterhood is not a frivolous undertaking. For Black women, peer support has been key for affirmation and survival. It has provided a space where feminine power is valued and nurtured. Sula Janet Evans, Queen Sula Spirit of the Mandingo Warriors, states:

Being in the same sacred community as the [Queens of the Nation members is] a high honor for me.… We know our power as women but on the planet, it’s been crushed a bit. It’s time that we know who we are. And so, as Big Queens, to stand up among these other women, who I highly respect, and to know that I’m counted among them and that we all represent the sacred grandmothers. Every tradition that is represented on the planet has a grandmother at the head of it.… It’s very sacred to me. When I look in the eyes of my sisters – I see so much. They give me power. They give me the courage to move on. They give me the courage to know that I’m accepted in my sacred family. … This is my sacred family and we are all just reconnecting with that. ¹⁴

The nonprofit is a safe space where the Queens have (re)defined their roles to address their needs. This bond has become the foundation for their civic engagement and a way to counter the isolation that can be felt in a male-dominated space. Queen Kelly explains how the sisterhood created through Queens of the Nation has been critical to her: “It’s hard being a Queen and a mom, have a job, school, whatever, but if you’re around other women who understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and that you’re doing all those other things that gives strength in making you keep going.… I feel if I didn’t have Queens of the Nation, I wouldn’t feel as strong as an Indian Queen.” ¹⁵ Being in the council helps allay stress that results from the multiple roles and responsibilities women have in their families and communities. Being among other Queens validates their experiences and contributions to their families, communities, and the Indian culture.

In contrast to the stereotype of the strong Black woman who works inexhaustibly to “make a way out of no way,” the Queens articulate the need for support and describe the camaraderie within Queens of the Nation as crucial to their lives. ¹⁶ This reinforces a more realistic version of Black womanhood, one in which strength is not innate to their race and sex but instead is drawn from the support and friendship of other women cultivated in such groups.

Queens of the Nation gives back to the community via programs for the elderly, for the impoverished, and for children. These include an annual Kids Fest to supply local children with school supplies, books, and a backpack, and a holiday tradition of distributing food baskets. With these activities and others, the Queens of the Nation are participating in Black women’s practice of othermothering, which addresses the needs of the Black community and serves as resistance to attempts to undermine Black families and communities. ¹⁷ Not predicated on biological motherhood, othermothering allows Black women to employ an “ethics of caring” that includes caretaking, sharing of material resources, mentoring, and emotional and psychological nurturance as resistance to racist and sexist oppression. ¹⁸ Queen Mary Kay underscores this and explains that “we give back to the community because that’s what we do – we’re a culture, we’re not an event.” ¹⁹ The Queens’ community mothering, then, is a cultural practice that celebrates women’s empowerment for the survival of the race. ²⁰ Mardi Gras Indian Queens are, in essence, the Aunties and Queen Mothers of their communities.

Being a Queen: Performing Royalty in Little Africa

The role of Queen transcends the expectations for Black women in mainstream society. The Mardi Gras Queens visually represent not only beauty and stateliness, but cultures that have not popularly been associated with royalty – African and Indigenous. Queens within the Mardi Gras tradition are primarily expected to exhibit beauty as an accessory for the chief. Neither the women nor their suits are supposed to outshine the chief. Within that limitation, however, the Queens have created a space to embody and articulate a powerful definition of Black beauty and Black womanhood.

The Queens serve as role models to the kids in the community, to the girls and young women in particular. As women, they are especially concerned about the girls because of the dearth of positive images of Black womanhood and the hyper-sexualized images of women in the media. In a society in which Black girls and women are frequently denigrated and objectified, such an acknowledgement of the beauty of Black women, who are not attempting to embody Eurocentric standards of beauty, is transformative.

Queen Kelly: You see the look in their eyes, those little girls, and I keep saying little girls, but even grown women, teenagers … you feel like you’re inspiring them, not just to be an Indian, but just to be better. And then they see that pretty comes in every form when we come out there.…She’s not Miss America, she ain’t Miss USA, don’t even want to be – but she is pretty…she looks good, and [they think] I want to do that too …

Queen Ausettua: And our young girls in this time so desperately need other role models…we just need other images for them to relate to so they can feel that it is ok to be associated with being a woman and being beautiful. You have clothes on; you’re not exposing your body. And I usually take that opportunity to say something to them positive …

Queen Kelly: It’s hard inspiring little girls.… They’ve seen so much; this is something tangible. This lady live down the street. That’s my neighbor; that’s Ms. Kelly, I can do that. ²¹

Queen Cherice further underscores the importance of self-defined standards of beauty for the Queens, and Black women and girls in general: “Pretty definitely has a place in it and that, too, becomes a form of resistance. Because I rebuke your standards of Western beauty. You don’t get to tell me that I’m not beautiful because I weigh two-hundred-plus pounds. You don’t get to tell me that. You don’t get to impose your standards on me on this day. Or any day for that matter.” ²² Queens are aware of the authority they have to positively influence the children who see them as celebrities, and they take that role seriously. They mentor the youth and model self-respect and respect for each other. They are clear about the images of beauty and messages about womanhood that they offer to Black girls.

Queenliness is intrinsic. As Queen Rita claims, “You can’t teach a Queen, a Queen is within.” Yet embodying the role does require guidance. In addition to exemplifying prettiness, Queens also perform respectability. Embracing a politics of respectability is nothing new for Black women. For generations, respectability has been advocated as a strategy for Black acceptance by whites and the pathway for inclusion and equality in American society. The idea that Black people should embrace middle-class values of dignity, morality, and composure was a central strategy, dating from the Black women’s club movement at the turn of the twentieth century to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Being a Queen includes embracing a posture of respectability as well. In that sense, the Queens are accepting and imposing a traditional definition of royal womanhood on themselves and others who participate in the tradition. Queen Rita explains that Queens are expected to assume a manner of respectability in representing themselves and their tribes during parades:

All Big Queens do is when they meet each other is dance a little bit, nothing rowdy, no obscene language, and then hug and show love and then the gang just go ahead on. That’s it. But you get some of the younger Queens that have not been taught the correct way …they will want to do it the way a male Indian do it but that’s not the way to do it, with the hooping and hollering and the cursing, and they want to swing and be violent about it. And it looks bad.

Part of the reason Queen Rita created the council was to assist in the socialization of young Queens, and the royal title helps. Queen Kelly contends that “[Queens are] really respected as royalty for real. So you’ve gotta be mindful of your behavior at all times because someone is always looking at you.” With the respect their stature brings comes the responsibility to represent queenly dignity. Notably, while Queens are expected to display gentility and decorum, the men can act in a traditionally masculine unrestrained and uninhibited manner.

Chiefs command power through performances of being pretty, singing, and dancing. Queen Sula believes the Queens embody an additional form of power that transcends royal designations. When Black girls see her, she says, “I want them to see divine feminine power. I want them to know that they can crush demons to the ground. I want them to know that they have the divine power to push past anything they’re dealing with in their emotional self. I want them to know that they come from the Great Mother of creation. And that they can do anything. There’s nothing that can stop them.” ²³ This effort to imbue Black girls with pride in feminine power is essential for their survival in a society in which their Blackness and sex are often viewed as deficits.

Queens as Culture Bearers

In addition to material and emotional sustenance, the Queens bring a spiritual dimension to the culture that is characteristic of Black women’s role as culture bearers. Activist-scholar-artist Bernice Johnson Reagon describes Black women as “people builders, carriers of cultural traditions, key to the formation and continuance of culture.” ²⁴ As such, they have historically been central to maintaining African cultural practices in the New World as resistance to white hegemony. ²⁵ This is most clearly displayed among the Indians with the Queens’ focus on spirituality and history.

The Queens articulate a high level of diasporic consciousness in their participation via historical understanding, spirituality, and artistic representations. Thus, they are consciously helping preserve an African-influenced Carnival culture that exists throughout the African Diaspora. Mardi Gras Indian culture is one that is uniquely New Orleanian and simultaneously representative of the African Diaspora, and the Queens are fully aware of this special position that makes it both local and transnational. Not unlike the intersectionality of Black women’s identity experiences, Indian culture is a multidimensional entity that embodies African spirituality and culture while reflecting New Orleans culture and the reality of living in the United States. It is African and American Indian; Old World and New World; feminine and masculine; and representative of the collective nature of West African societies.

Queen Sula Spirit, who was initiated into the priesthood in Ghana, is a spiritualist in New Orleans who holds more than one crown. “This is the year I take the double crown. This is the year that I will initiate under the Yoruba, and I’m already initiated in the Akan, so I always knew I’d wear a double crown,” she said. ²⁶ Prior to becoming a Queen, she had conducted blessings for the Guardians of the Flame. She describes her role as an Indian Queen as “a reconnection to a sacred and ancient way. It’s how we all gathered anyway. It’s how we used to gather when we were in Africa and when we were in our Native American villages. Women…were the backbone and are the backbone of every tradition in every community. For me it was an ancient calling to an old way of being.” ²⁷ Queen Sula’s masking draws on the status that women possessed in traditional African religions and in matrilineal Native American tribes.

Masking allows Queen Sula to tap into a power that is her birthright by race, culture, and religion. It is a power to shape and transform society beyond the tribe, community, or city; a power to transform the human condition. Sula recalls that her first time masking as a Mardi Gras Indian was prompted by a dream of Mami Wata instructing her to “put her on the street.” In the dream, Mami Wata said, “I need you to make this suit of power; it’s gonna help heal people.” Queen Sula’s masking, then, is an extension of her spirituality and a way to pay homage to the feminine divine. She explains that, “Every suit, every energy comes to heal the people… each suit has a different vibration when I put it on. The intended purpose is that when people touch it or when they come near it, they will receive the healing that suit is intended to bring.” ²⁸ Thus, masking allows Queen Sula to fulfill her responsibilities to care for and transform her community by manifesting the feminine divine.

Queen Ausettua also describes masking as a spiritual connection to her ancestors: “The highest form of offering and praise you can give to your ancestors is by putting this on and hittin’ the streets because when you walk on the streets you not walking by yourself. It’s a whole pile of people you can’t even see; they have come before you, who are walking beside you and carrying you… so that’s the spiritual part that you feel.” ²⁹ Many Blacks, including some Mardi Gras Indians, count American Indians among those ancestors. Queen Rukiya Brown sees her masking as a tribute to her Choctaw great-grandmother. ³⁰ Queen Sula prayed for assistance to her great-grandmother, who had lived on a reservation four hours from New Orleans, and received it when making her first suit: “It was not hard for me. It did not come as a struggle, because I just knew, I had ancestors who did this.” ³¹ Because of these connections, Queen Ausettua rejects the criticism from some scholars and outsiders that Mardi Gras Indians are “playing Indian” with their nomenclature and suit designs. ³² The tradition is not “playing” in their eyes because it is a spiritual ritual that connects them to their ancestors, without whose struggle and passing on of traditions they would not exist. Queen Sula juxtaposes the significance of the Indians’ performance of ritual with whites’ Mardi Gras festivities: “There’s such a powerful calling. And it is not a joke. It’s not some costuming thing. It’s not what white folks do when they parade. It’s not. I don’t know how much each person knows about African masquerade stuff. But if you’ve never been to Africa, you goin’ to Africa Mardi Gras day.” The Senegalese poet and prominent Negritude writer Birago Diop articulates this connection between the living and the dead in his poem “Breaths”: “The dead are not beneath the ground/They are in the rustling tree/In the murmuring wood/In the flowing water/In the still water/In the lonely place, in the crowd:/The dead are not dead.” In celebrating, and celebrating with their ancestors, the Mardi Gras Indians are also honoring the cultural practices and beliefs that persist throughout the diaspora.

The Queens recognize the articulations of Mardi Gras Indian culture as Africanisms and know the importance of preserving these practices. In so doing, they not only honor the African culture that has survived, but the spirit of resistance that has sustained Black people and their communities in the face of severe repression. For at least some of the Queens, the culture is as much about maintaining the Africanisms as the masking Indian, if not more so. The tradition itself represents Black people’s ability to survive, preserving something that is uniquely Black. The creation and evolution of Black culture – e.g., from spirituals and blues to jazz and rap –  reflect the resilience, adaptability, and perseverance of African people to assert their humanity through cultural preservation.         

The Queens are also cognizant of their connection to the larger African Diaspora. Queen Ausettua explains that Carnival among Blacks in New Orleans is “similar to what happens in Trinidad, in Haiti, in Cuba, that same tradition of continuing that African retention.” ³³ Likenesses are evident in the specificity of rituals and the generalities of Black life. Queen Rukiya describes the similarities she witnessed among Blacks during a three-month trip to Haiti: “I saw gold in their mouth. I saw them with their sweat towel, I saw you know the same things that we did here but also their spirit because after the earthquake and everything it look like they just got up and did what they had to do and that’s what we doing here in New Orleans. No matter what. You know we still say good morning, we still say good evening, and we still have a smile but that endurance of survival.” ³⁴ The story of the African Diaspora is one of survival via cultural preservation and resistance.

Speaking of her time in Ghana on a Fulbright Scholarship, Queen Cherice recalls “one of the things I took from that experience was that I know not only from my readings, but from what I feel in my soul and in my spirit, that this tradition is a way for me to connect myself physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually back to my ancestral homeland one bead at a time. You tried to sever those ties, but I found a way and this is the way, one of the ways, for me.” ³⁵ Queen Cherice’s historical understanding provides an important context that highlights Black agency. While Blacks admired the resistance of Indigenous peoples, it was a spirit they, too, embodied. She also discusses the role of the Indians in passing on knowledge and traditions:

The goals of the Guardians of the Flame I think have always been, as my father said, “to guard the flame and pass it on.” The flame is the tradition and the fact that the tradition emanates from West Africa. Of course, we know transformations exist and it’s not purely intact with a particular West African tradition, and I don’t have a monolithic view of West Africa. But we are …like a mixture, a big gumbo of all our African traditions…. We recognize and celebrate that this tradition is rooted in African traditions. Of course, due to all the transformations, it is uniquely an African American tradition. ³⁶

This cultural practice, while similar to others that have emerged throughout the Diaspora, is imbued with the uniqueness of Blacks’ experiences in New Orleans. During and after the Haitian Revolution, many whites and free people of color fled the country and relocated to New Orleans. Some brought the enslaved people they owned, many of them first generation Africans, who reinforced Louisiana’s African culture, religion, and language. Coupled with this is the fact that Blacks in Louisiana experienced a multi-tiered racial caste system, shaped by French and Spanish colonialism, different from that experienced by other (enslaved) Blacks in the racially binary Deep South, and tended to have greater opportunities for the overt retention of African culture. In New Orleans specifically, Congo Square provided Blacks a place to openly sing, dance, and play music. Therefore, it is understandable that this uniquely New Orleans tradition would emerge in this location. This awareness is an integral component of the culture itself and one that the Queens ensure is passed on. The culture that emerged in New Orleans is both a response to and a byproduct of slavery. From that legacy grew a tradition that pays homage to the African diaspora, one in which “the role of women in the Mardi Gras tradition is just as critical and invisible as the role of the Queen mothers in Africa.” ³⁷

Conclusion

Similar to Candomble in Brazil or Vodun in Haiti, what once existed as a subculture is becoming mainstream. Queen Ausettua explains this dynamic in the context of attempts to rebuild New Orleans post-Katrina:

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, I don’t feel the city really embraced the culture as if it was theirs. They looked at it as “that’s their culture, that’s the black people’s stuff that they do.” … [After Katrina] they wanted us out while they tried to reconfigure things. But then they realized if we don’t let them back in, wait a minute, who gonna do the rest of this stuff here. And then all of a sudden it became our culture. They began to claim it because they realize that the things that make New Orleans unique was the very same people who you was trying to keep outta here. Without us, it ain’t New Orleans. ³⁸

Out of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the Mardi Gras Indians have garnered unprecedented recognition, a symbol of the city’s artistry and determination amid a larger cultural resurgence. ­­­­­­­Leslie Wade argues that post-Katrina Mardi Gras “offered the opportunity to demonstrate survival, to uphold the city’s unique way of life, and to collectively embody an unbroken spirit.” ³⁹ Through this collective effort to celebrate Carnival and New Orleanians’ resilience, the world is getting more opportunities to observe how some members of New Orleans’ Black working class have asserted their humanity and combated the effects of poverty and racial oppression. Women, however, are still working to claim some of this space.

Just as the Mardi Gras Indians asserted their humanity when they began masking by claiming public space not intended for Blacks, Queens are claiming space within this male-dominated tradition. Queen Rukiya centers women in her sewing, explaining that “when I bead I like to tell stories and it always has to do with women and it always has to do with what’s going on with us in New Orleans.” ⁴⁰ Queen Rita does it with the Queens of the Nation council, Queen Cherice does it with the annual Queens Choice Award, which she began in 2005 as part of the Mardi Gras Indians Hall of Fame, and Queen Sula does it in honoring the feminine divine and in her role as a healer. The Queens support their chiefs and acknowledge the importance of the tradition for Black men, yet they are also, and rightly so, beginning to publicly articulate their importance to the culture as well.

The Queens’ power is manifested in the impact they have on girls in the community who see and treat them as royalty, deferring to their beauty, their power, and their sway. At the same time, this power is not superficial. The Queens work to protect their communities from the ravages of poverty and marginalization. They know that bravado does not create power and that the ability to pass down culture is the power of survival: The Queen’s power.

Works Cited

Beauboeuf-Lafontant, Tamara. Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009.

Breunlin, Rachel and Ronald W. Lewis, The House of Dance & Feathers: A Museum by Ronald W. Lewis. New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press, 2009.

Brooks, James F. ed. Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North

America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Bush, Barbara. “Defiance or Resistance: The Role of the Slave Woman in Slave Resistance in the British Caribbean.” In We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible: A Reader in Black Women’s History. Edited by Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed. New York: Carlson Publishing, 1995.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Davis, Angela. “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.” The Black Scholar 3, no. 4 (December 1971): 2-15.

Dewulf, Jeroen. “The Missing Link between Congo Square and the Mardi Gras Indians? The Anonymous Story of ‘The Singing Girl of New Orleans’ (1849).” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Winter 2019): 83-95.

Fandrich, Ina Johanna. Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveaux: A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Green, Rayna. “The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe.” Folklore, Vol. 99, Issue 1 (1998): 30-55.

Hamlin, Françoise. Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta After World War II. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Harris-Perry, Melissa V. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

Harrison-Nelson, Cherice. Untitled presentation. McKenna Museum of African-American Art, New Orleans, LA, January 9, 2015.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990 [orig published J.B. Lippincott, 1935].

James F. Brooks, ed. Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Long, Carolyn Morrow. A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2007.

McDonald, Katrina Bell. “Black Activist Mothering: A Historical Intersection of Race, Gender and Class.” Gender and Society 11, no. 6 (December 1997): 773-795.

Miles, Tiya and Sharon P. Holland, eds. Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Morris, Tiyi. Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015.

Naples, Nancy A. “Activist Mothering: Cross Generational Continuity in the Community Work of Women from Low-Income Urban Neighborhoods.” Gender and Society 6, no. 3 (September 1992): 441-463.

Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “African Diaspora Women: The Making of Cultural Workers.” Feminist Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 77–90.

Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “My Black Mother and Sisters or on Beginning a Cultural Autobiography.” Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 81-96.

Robnett, Belinda. How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Smith, Michael. “New Orleans’ Hidden Carnival.” Cultural Vistas. New Orleans: Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, Autumn 1990.

Wade, Leslie A. “Introduction.” In Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Edited by Leslie A. Wade, Robin Roberts, and Frank de Caro. Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2017.

Woods, Clyde. “Upholding Community Traditions: An Interview with Cherice Harrison-Nelson.” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (Sept 2009): 639-648.

1. Mardi Gras Indians and Indians will be used interchangeably throughout the text. American Indians will be used to refer to this country’s Indigenous peoples.[↑]
2. Rayna Green, “The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe,” Folklore, Vol. 99, Issue 1 (1998), 31.[↑]
3. Rachel Breunlin and Ronald W. Lewis, The House of Dance & Feathers: A Museum by Ronald W. Lewis (New Orleans: UNO Press, 2009), 66, 89. For a discussion of a mid-1800s origin date, see Jeroen Dewulf, “The Missing Link between Congo Square and the Mardi Gras Indians? The Anonymous Story of ‘The Singing Girl of New Orleans’ (1849),” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Winter 2019), 84-5.[↑]
4. Michael Smith, “New Orleans’ Hidden Carnival.” Cultural Vistas. New Orleans: Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, Autumn 1990.[↑]
5. Quoted in Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 41.[↑]
6. Brown, interview.[↑]
7. Clyde Woods, “Upholding Community Traditions: An Interview with Cherice Harrison-Nelson,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (Sept 2009), 642.[↑]
8. Recent biographies have built upon Zora Neale Hurston’s depictions of Laveau, a free woman of color and leader of New Orleans’ Voodoo community, as either an example of strong womanhood (Ward and Fandrich), or an ordinary woman maligned and mythologized (Long). See Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990 [orig published J.B. Lippincott, 1935]; Ina Johanna Fandrich, Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveaux: A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Carolyn Morrow Long, A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2007).[↑]
9. Kelly Ann Pearson, interview by Rian Hamadnalla, January 6, 2015.[↑]
10. Queens of the Nation members, interview by Torah Silvera and Angela Whipple, January 6, 2015.[↑]
11. Cherice Harrison-Nelson, untitled presentation, McKenna Museum of African-American Art, New Orleans, Louisiana, January 9, 2015.[↑]
12. Michelle Hammothe, interview by Ashley Theodore, March 21, 2015.[↑]
13. Mary Kay Stevenson, interview by Rian Hamadnalla, January 6, 2015.[↑]
14. Sula Janet Evans, interview by Rian Hamadnalla, January 6, 2015.[↑]
15. Kelly Ann Pearson, interview by Lenise Alexandra Sunnenberg, March 21, 2015.[↑]
16. See Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); and Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011) for a discussion of the detrimental impact of the strong Black woman stereotype on Black women’s mental and physical health.[↑]
17. Bernice Johnson Reagon, “African Diaspora Women: The Making of Cultural Workers,” Feminist Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 1986), 77-90.[↑]
18. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (NY: Routledge, 2008), 192-3.[↑]
19. Stevenson, interview.[↑]
20. For a discussion of activist mothering, see Nancy A. Naples, “Activist Mothering: Cross Generational Continuity in the Community Work of Women from Low-Income Urban Neighborhoods,” Gender and Society 6, no. 3 (September 1992): 441-463; Katrina Bell McDonald, “Black Activist Mothering: A Historical Intersection of Race, Gender and Class,” Gender and Society 11, no. 6 (December 1997): 773-795; Francoise Hamlin, Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta After World War II (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 59-70; and Tiyi Morris, Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 6-7.[↑]
21. Queens of the Nation, interview.[↑]
22. Cherice Harrison-Nelson, interview by Tiyi Morris, December 2019.[↑]
23. Sula Janet Evans, interview by Tiyi Morris, December 2019.[↑]
24. Bernice Johnson Reagon, “My Black Mother and Sisters or on Beginning a Cultural Autobiography,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 81.[↑]
25. See Barbara Bush, “Defiance or Resistance: The Role of the Slave Woman in Slave Resistance in the British Caribbean” in Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed, eds. We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible: A Reader in Black Women’s History (NY: Carlson Publishing, 1995); and Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” The Black Scholar 3, no. 4 (December 1971), for a discussion of enslaved women’s centrality to slave revolts and other forms of resistance.[↑]
26. Evans, interview, 2019.[↑]
27. Evans, interview, 2015.[↑]
28. Evans, interview, 2019.[↑]
29. Queens of the Nation, interview.[↑]
30. Rukiya Brown, interview by Torah Silvera, January 6, 2015.[↑]
31. Evans, interview, 2019.[↑]
32. For a discussion of Black Indians, see James F. Brooks, ed. Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002) and Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland, eds. Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).[↑]
33. Queens of the Nation, interview.[↑]
34. Brown, interview, 2015.[↑]
35. Harrison-Nelson, presentation.[↑]
36. Clyde Woods, “Upholding Community Traditions: An Interview with Cherice Harrison-Nelson,” 644.[↑]
37. Evans interview, 2019.[↑]
38. Amenkum, interview.[↑]
39. Leslie A. Wade, “Introduction” in Leslie A. Wade, Robin Roberts, and Frank de Caro, eds. Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Mississippi Press, 2017), 4.[↑]
40. Brown, interview, 2015.[↑]