Monk Boudreaux was born to be a Mardi Gras Indian.

It is not a career, a craft or a profession, though one needs to go through an apprenticeship to become one.

It’s a blood and spirit celebration of the bond between African people brought to the New World as slaves and the indigenous people who were here when they arrived. The interchange was not just cultural. Monk, like many Mardi Gras Indians, is part of the undocumented creolization that occurred when the arrivals to the New World i...