Hail to the Chiefs: Eric Overmyer on Mardi Gras Indians As New Orleans turns 300, the cocreator of HBO’s Treme offers a ballad to the indelible beauty and tradition of Mardi Gras Indians

Jockamo fee nah nay Jockamo fee nah nay If you don’t like what the Big Chief say Jockamo fee nah nay

Of all Crescent City mysteries, the Mardi Gras Indians are the deepest and the most thrilling. Their origins are obscure and contentious, their handmade, one-of-a-kind, new-every-single-year feathered and beaded suits—don’t call them costumes—are jaw-droppingly beautiful, a triumph of individual artisanship and communal effort deployed in ritual displays of beauty and pride, symbolic conflict and defiance. Working-class men (mostly), women and entire families labor over a new suit for an entire year every year, designing, beading, feathering and sewing it to parade and compete in on Mardi Gras Day, to see who’s “the prettiest.”

Tough guys from tough neighborhoods spend their year—and considerable time and money—sewing, so that their friends, neighbors, families and rival Indian gangs will say, “You the prettiest.” As Big Chief Monk Boudreaux of the Golden Eagles sings, Every year at Carnival time, I make a new suit.

Their art is not only visual; the dancing and chants and songs and drumming and Afro-Caribbean rhythms, threaded through with scraps of a secret patois, are miraculous and one of the wellsprings of New Orleans music. The eponymous foundational albums by the Wild Tchoupitoulas and the Wild Magnolias. “Jock-a-Mo” by Sugar Boy Crawford and the Cane Cutters. And seminal New Orleans artists like Professor Longhair, the Neville Brothers—related by blood to the Wild Tchoupitoulas—and Dr. John have spread the gospel. Jockamo. Indian Red. Iko Iko.

The Dixie Cups had an accidental hit with “Iko Iko” back in the day, when they were fooling around in between takes recording Chapel of Love and started singing this little Mardi Gras Indian song; the late great Allen Toussaint let the tape run. It’s genius—these three teenage girls singing a capella with a tiny bit of percussion:

My spy boy told your spy boy

Sittin’ on the bayou

My spy boy told your spy boy

Gonna set your tail on fi-yo

Hey now (hey now) Hey now (hey now)

Jockamo fee nah nay

America had no idea what they were singing about. But the voices were as sweet as cane syrup and the rhythms infectious. Jockamo fee nah nay. Mighty kootie fiyo. Two way pocky way. What is that? Louisiana Creole, an almost extinct language? Bits of Choctaw? Both or neither? Who knows. What does it mean? Jockamo fee nah nay. If you don’t like what the Big Chief say—jockamo fee nah nay. It might mean, Get the hell out of the way. Good luck getting a Mardi Gras Indian to confirm or deny that.

Indians Rulers on the Holiday

For that year’s worth of effort, the Mardi Gras Indians appear in full regalia just three times: on Mardi Gras Day, St. Joseph’s Night (March 19) and Super Sunday (the Sunday closest to St. Joseph’s Day). Some gangs suit up and parade at Jazz Fest, but that’s a paid gig, a performance.

Mighty kootie fiyo on a Mardi Gras Day

Mardi Gras Day, the Uptown gangs and the Downtown gangs meet on a neutral ground like Hunter’s Field and battle it out. In the old days, the Indians were rough customers, the battle was literal, with knives, bottles and guns, and decent folk forbade their children to follow them. Which made them even more mythic and irresistible. Indians comin’!

In modern times, the battle between gangs is symbolic—chant, dance, display. Who’s the prettiest? Spread those feathers. Chant that insult. Brag big. Strut. Uptown Ruler!

But St. Joseph’s? St. Joseph’s is an important Sicilian holiday in New Orleans, a feast day with elaborate food altars and its own parades. What does St. Joseph’s have to do with the Indians? Sicilians and black people lived in some of the same Downtown neighborhoods, the Lower French Quarter, Treme. The exact reason the Indians come out on St. Joe’s Night, no one knows. But to see an Indian or a group of them drifting home through the deserted streets late that night is magical—an apparition from another world, an indelible image.

The origins of the Mardi Gras Indians are obscure. For a long time, the standard anthropological default origin story was the visit to New Orleans of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the 1880s. And indeed, the name of the oldest Uptown gang is Creole Wild West. That explanation has been rightly rejected and discredited as reductive and racist. Most Mardi Gras Indians instead trace their roots back to the long alliance between Choctaw, Houma and other Native people with runaway slaves and free people of color. Certainly the “Red Indian” was a familiar figure in European and Creole Carnival since early colonial times. No doubt there were already gangs of black men masking as Indians during Mardi Gras at the time of Buffalo Bill’s New Orleans engagement, and it is reasonable to assume (as some Indians will privately speculate today) that the sight of Plains Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne in their full feathered war bonnets might have been inspirational for New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians. That’s Creole culture—it absorbs and transforms.

One of the main characters in Treme—the soul of the show—was Albert Lambreaux, the Big Chief of the Guardians of the Flame. The Guardians are a real gang, and their young Big Chief, Brian Nelson, was gracious enough to accept a demotion in our fictional version and lend us his expertise. As did the jazz musician and Big Chief Donald Harrison, who was our primary Mardi Gras Indian consultant.

Several of the other members were played by real Mardi Gras Indians, and it gave our Indian scenes—practices and Mardi Gras and St. Joseph’s Night showdowns and funeral ceremonies—an authenticity they would not otherwise have had. A couple of our Guardians are Louisiana State Police officers in their private lives, and more than once I walked into the costume shop to find Otto DeJean, Big Chief of the Seventh Ward Hard Head Hunters, in his police uniform, pistol on the table, sitting with the wardrobe ladies, sewing patches for that season’s Indian suits, brilliantly designed by Alonzo Wilson.



Albert was modeled in part on Big Chief Tootie Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas, and like Tootie—who was the most important and most innovative designer and builder of suits in the Downtown style (don’t ask me) and the leader of the Mardi Gras Indian community (the New Orleans Museum of Art mounted an exhibit in celebration of Tootie’s life and work titled “He’s the Prettiest”)—is a plasterer, an artisan, from the Creole Seventh Ward.



Most crucially, like Tootie, Albert has a musician son who is uncertain about carrying on the tradition—but ultimately does, after his father’s death. And that’s the real point. The Mardi Gras Indians are astonishing artists, artisans and musicians, part of a unique living tradition passed down through family, generation to generation. An enduring tradition, mysterious and spiritual. Cyril Neville often introduces “Indian Red” saying, “Let’s go to church.” Dr. John will say, before he sings his version, “This is the Indians’ most sacredest song.”

Mighty kootie fiyo

Indian Red, Indian Red

How I love to hear them call my Indian “Red”

So, in the words of Professor Longhair:

If you go to New Orleans

You ought to go see the Mardi Gras…

When you see the Mardi Gras

Somebody’ll tell you what’s Carnival for

I hope you go to New Orleans. I hope you go see the Mardi Gras. Most of all, I hope you see the Mardi Gras Indians in the streets of New Orleans doing their thing. Only in New Orleans. Ain’t nothing like it nowhere.

Jockamo fee nah nay.





Eric Overmyer was the cocreator of HBO’s Treme with David Simon (they also collaborated on The Wire and Homicide). He has served as executive producer on Boardwalk Empire, The Affair, Law & Order, Bosch and, currently, Amazon’s Man in the High Castle.