White Buffalo Day, 2006

On Sunday, we danced at Congo Square. A couple of hundred people. Dozens of drummers, playing congas, djembes, batas, tambourines, cowbells, buckets. It was
White Buffalo Day in New Orleans. There was a storm troubling the waters of the Caribbean. We were approaching the anniversary of the disaster that destroyed our city. And so we danced.

There had already been many somber remembrances of Katrina, and memorials for the lives that were lost. Now it was time to heed the words of Bob Marley: “Forget your sorrows, and dance.” White people and black people and mestizos, we were all (for once) in the same leaky boat. Finally, nobody was talking about insurance settlements or SBA loans or FEMA trailers or levees or even Katrina. The Soul Rebels had us all on the same beat (well, most of us), chanting “no place like home” and really feeling it, believing it. Because where else would a Lakota Sioux chief and a black Mardi Gras Indian come together to celebrate the birth of a white buffalo calf?

This is the twelfth year we’ve celebrated White Buffalo Day in New Orleans. I remember when Arvol Lookinghorse brought the sacred pipe to Congo Square and passed it on to Big Chief Tootie Montana. There were only a few people standing around in a circle, under the oaks. Lookinghorse recognized the Maroon people of Louisiana, who had fought for freedom alongside the indigenous people, as brothers. And these black Mardi Gras Indians were the descendants of the Maroons in spirit and in blood. The birth of the white buffalo calf presaged a new era of harmony on the earth. Okay, we’re still waiting for that, but Lookinghorse came back, year after year, and they brought black Indians and black children out to the reservations to meet the Lakota and the Hopi people to exchange ideas and culture and create a little harmony of their own.

On Sunday, Lookinghorse chanted a prayer on the sacred ground of Congo Square, and the black Indians sang “Indian Red”, their own prayer song, and then the drummers took over and it was Congo Square, just like we imagined our ancestors enjoyed it: slaves and free people of color, taking a Sunday afternoon off to play music and dance, to sell produce and crafts, to talk and flirt and plan and pray. Back then, the white folks just stood around and watched, but now they were free too, free to play drums and dance and revel in the culture.

In the old days, the people probably didn’t know that Congo Square was the only place in America where African slaves were allowed to gather openly on a regular basis. But the people dancing on Sunday knew how special this place was. Most of them had been displaced for some time over the past year, to places all over the country. And they knew, deep down, that there’s no place like home. And no place at all like a home in New Orleans.

- Royce Osborn
Producer/Director
"Walking To new Orleans"