Too easily associated with mindless abandon, Mardi Gras Indians, a.k.a. Black Indians, in fact, defy conventional understandings of carnival. Instead of senseless excess, attention to their complex performance structure – the suits they sew, the chants they chant, and the dances they dance – are all ways these urban tribes safeguard and manifest the silenced history of how Black and Indigenous alliances actively resisted the plantation system imposed through colonial domination. This series focuses on three moments during Mardi Gras 2023: Indian practice, the preparation leading up to the march, and the marches through Tremé and the Seventh Ward, two traditionally Black neighbourhoods in New Orleans.

Black Indians perform as an act of remembrance, a forgotten and silenced history of Indigenous and Black alliances. The interest in silencing this history of alliances comes from the constant need to eradicate how Black and Indigenous peoples actively came together to fight not only the horrors of slavery and colonialism but also the subsequent threat of the monoculture in the form of monocropping. In that regard, the close attention we propose here makes evident how carnival counteracts the logic of labour exploitation that permanently already codifies and enables environmental catastrophe. These photographs, along with their accompanying text, explore how the festive safeguards and transmits modes of coming together that ultimately and insistently teach us how to prevent disaster.

This story is also a first glimpse of Rich Things, a larger, ongoing book project and collaboration between Camila Falquez and Luis Rincón Alba, that seeks to reframe visual and theoretical understandings of the rebelliousness that inhabits and informs carnival and festive practices in communities of colour across the Americas.