New Orleans: The Mardi Gras Indians

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (New Orleans jazz mini-series, episode 213) is a short documentary about the Mardi Gras Indians, also called Black Masking Indians, groups of Black people from New Orleans. It opens on a suit covered in feathers and thousands of tiny beads, bright from head to foot, and explains that each group is called a gang or a tribe, led by a Big Chief. The tradition is more than 140 years old: one of the first gangs, the Creole Wild West, started in the 1880s, and many people say the suits honour Native Americans, who helped Black people to escape from slavery long ago. Each person makes a new suit every year and never wears the same suit twice; it is sewn by hand, the work can take a whole year, and a finished suit can weigh more than forty kilos. The episode then looks closer at the front of a suit, where the beads make pictures that tell a story: a battle, an animal or a scene from history. The Indians come out on special days like Mardi Gras, the big carnival day in February or March, and walk through their neighbourhood, singing and chanting to drums and tambourines. When two gangs meet, the Big Chiefs face each other; these meetings were sometimes violent long ago, and today they are a competition of beauty.

The narration is in the present simple, with passives (is covered in feathers, is sewn by hand), a relative clause (Native Americans, who helped Black people), can (can take a whole year, can weigh) and the past simple for the history (started in the 1880s); no grammar point is taught. It is a listening comprehension episode: learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (Big Chief, gang, Mardi Gras). The closing question (Why do you think they make a new suit every year?) opens a short class discussion about traditions, pride and craft.

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the script; there is no lesson plan. The pupil pack and the teacher pack (answers highlighted) are one A4 page each, with the text, three photos (a Mardi Gras Indian in a blue feather suit with a large beaded patch on the front, a man wearing a suit whose front is one big beaded picture, two Indians in green and in orange and blue facing each other), the key words and the 10 questions. The folder also holds a one-page pupil sheet with the 10 questions and a teacher sheet with the answer key. Learners should know the present simple and the past simple of common verbs and be able to read dates and numbers. The script explains its new words as it goes (Mardi Gras Indians, gang, tribe, Big Chief, Mardi Gras).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c4-languages-and-communication ("Langages") and c4-encountering-others ("Rencontres avec d'autres cultures"), Cycle 4 (3e). The episode targets CEFR level B1-.