Jockomo: The Native Roots of Mardi Gras Indians, Hardcover

Jockomo: The Native Roots of Mardi Gras Indians celebrates the transcendent experience of Mardi Gras, encompassing both ancient and current traditions of New Orleans. The Mardi Gras Indians are a renowned and beloved fixture of New Orleans public culture. Yet very little is known about the indigenous roots of their cultural practices. For the first time, this book explores the Native American ceremonial traditions that influenced the development of the Mardi Gras Indian cultural system. Jockomo reveals the complex story of exchanges that have taken place over the past three centuries, generating new ways of singing and speaking, with many languages mixing as people's lives overlapped.

Contemporary photographs by John McCusker and archival images combine to offer a complementary narrative to the text. From the depictions of eighteenth-century Native American musical processions to the first known photo of Mardi Gras Indians, Jockomo is a visual feast, displaying the evolution of cultural traditions throughout the history of New Orleans.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Mardi Gras Indians had become a recognized local tradition. Over the course of the next one hundred years, their unique practices would move from the periphery to the very center of public consciousness as a quintessentially New Orleanian form of music and performance, even while retaining some of the most ancient features of Native American culture and language. Jockomo offers a new way of seeing and hearing the blended legacies of New Orleans.

Shane Lief was born and raised in New Orleans. Over the past decade, he has presented papers at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the American Anthropological Association, the Society for German-American Studies, and the Louisiana Historical Association. When not teaching or writing about the history of languages, he plays music and leads a percussion band that marches in Mardi Gras parades. John McCusker is a New Orleans native who worked as a photojournalist for three decades at the Times-Picayune and later the New Orleans Advocate. He was part of the team that shared the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Journalism for covering Hurricane Katrina. He is author of Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz, published by University Press of Mississippi, and founder of the Cradle of Jazz Tour.