Tootie Montana: The Chief of Chiefs

The Mardi Gras Indians' Chief of Chiefs

No essay about New Orleans people would be complete without mentioning the Mardi Gras Indians — the African American masking tradition that has been part of the city's cultural fabric for more than a century. And no conversation about the Indians can happen without mentioning Allison "Tootie" Montana, the man known as the Chief of Chiefs.

Montana was born in 1922 in the Seventh Ward and became Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas tribe in the 1940s. For more than fifty years, he led the transformation of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition from one defined partly by violence — the gangs of Indians had historically clashed on Mardi Gras day — to one defined by artistry. Montana was the chief who said the competition should be about who had the prettiest suit, not who could fight the hardest.

And his suits were extraordinary. Montana was a master craftsman who spent the entire year sewing elaborate beaded and feathered suits that weighed as much as a hundred pounds. Each suit told a story. Each suit was a work of art that would be worn once — on Mardi Gras day — and then dismantled so the work could begin again for next year. His craftsmanship elevated the tradition from folk art to fine art.

Montana was also an activist. In June 2005, at the age of eighty-two, he stood before the New Orleans City Council to protest police harassment of Mardi Gras Indians during their St. Joseph's Night celebrations. In the middle of his testimony, he collapsed and died of a heart attack. He died fighting for the culture he had spent his life preserving.

His death, coming just two months before Hurricane Katrina, marked the end of an era. But the tradition he shaped lives on — every Mardi Gras day, when the Indians mask and take to the streets in suits that would make Tootie Montana proud, they're carrying forward the vision of the Chief of Chiefs.