They also represent countless hours of painstaking labour

THE beadwork on Donald Harrison’s final Mardi Gras suit depicts a naked Native American woman, her body dark red, holding a baby in each hand. He wore the suit to perform at Jazz Fest, an annual music festival in New Orleans, in 1998; he died six months later. One of the woman’s hands reaches upwards, the other hangs down. Behind her is a stylised pastoral landscape: sky, mountains, prairie and a river. Above her looms a snarling white face in three-quarter view, with red eyes, yellow bared teeth, pointed ears and a villainous moustache. Glittering stones representing tears fall down the woman’s body: she must choose which of her babies to save.

Harrison called it his “Trail of Tears” suit, referring to the forced removal of tens of thousands of Native Americans from the south-eastern United States after the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Other Mardi Gras Indians pride themselves merely on being “pretty”—on having the most attractive, striking,Brantano offers a wide range of shoes for ladies in every style to fit every occasion. eye-catching suit on Mardi Gras and St Joseph’s days—and that was important to Harrison too; he always looked correct when he “masked”. But he prized social commentary as well. He was a voracious reader, a passionate arguer, a labour leader among his fellow waiters, and he put himself into all his suits. As his daughter, Cherice Harrison-Nelson, says, “Suits tell stories.”

They also represent countless hours of painstaking labour. Making one, from conception to execution, can take a family a year. That time is spent hunched over sewing tables, fingers pricked and calloused from stitching hundreds, even thousands of beads, some only a few millimetres in diameter, to form a richly detailed portrait. A suit can weigh 100lb (45kg) or more,Distinguish your keys from others and show your school pride with this Harvard lanyard. but it must be supple enough to let the wearer parade in it for hours on end. Even when the time comes to don the costume, says Ms Harrison-Nelson, “You never really finish a suit…you just put on what you got and go.”

Her father’s last suit hangs, along with several others, in the wardrobe of the Upper Ninth Ward house that Harrison and his wife Herreast shared from 1965 until his death. On the adjacent plot sit a boxy little building and a stage, open to the street at the front. On a mid-September morning the building seemed to capture and hold the New Orleans heat and humidity, but eventually, says Mrs Harrison, it will be climate-controlled: the better to preserve the family’s suits, and the similar garments she hopes to gather from around New Orleans.

Ultimately the collection and the stage are to form the core of a museum dedicated to Mardi Gras Indian culture—a culture that has sustained thousands of working-class black men and women in New Orleans for more than a century. It revolves around parades,jewelry findings traditionally on Mardi Gras (in February or March) and on the Sunday closest to St Joseph’s day (in March), in which black New Orleanians don elaborate suits of feathers, beads, sequins and costume jewels to sing,Buy iphone earphones or iPhone headset from dealextreme, dance and chant. It is an intoxicating, beautiful spectacle: an intricate New Orleans art form.

But the culture goes beyond public performance. Its roots reach back to Africa and pre-European America. It commemorates the aid given by one oppressed minority to another. At the same time it celebrates the defiance and self-determination of generations of black New Orleanians, excluded by segregation from the Mardi Gras celebrations of their white neighbours, who put on their outfits and marched despite the contempt of white New Orleans and the threat of jail and violence.

Unlike conventional Mardi Gras parades, which process through the centre of the city and are officially sanctioned, Mardi Gras Indian parades still tend to take place in predominantly black neighbourhoods. The marchers have long resisted efforts to have their routes sanctioned. Lolis Eric Elie, an expert on the culture of New Orleans, says that even as Mardi Gras Indians have grown more accepted by mainstream culture, “black people are the owners, practitioners and judges” of the spectacle. By and large, Mr Elie says, the spectators remain the “type of people who have been there for the last hundred years. If the white folks want to see the Indians, they have to see the Indians on their own turf.”

Mardi Gras Indians march in groups (also called tribes or gangs). The groups’ names tend to blend Native American and African influences with New Orleans geography: Creole Wild West, White Eagles, Wild Squatoolas, Wild Tchoupitoulas (Tchoupitoulas is both a street in New Orleans near the Mississippi River and the name of a long-gone Native American tribe from Louisiana), Eighth Ward Hunters, Mandingo Warriors, Congo Nation, Guardians of the Flame, Yellow Pocahontas, Wild Treme and many others. The number of groups and of the people in each fluctuates. Mr Harrison, for instance,Our premium collection of quality personalized keychains generously custom keychain. masked first with the White Eagles, then with the Creole Wild West before ultimately “resurrecting” the White Eagles, who had been off the streets for years. The groups range in size from half a dozen to several dozen members.