Documentary portrait of Tootie Montana, Mardis Gras Indian chief. | dG1fcjh4Q0RXOFlKWFU
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Short filmTranscript
00:00Oh, my Indian rain, my Indian rain, my Indian rain, my Indian rain, because I love to live
00:10in Indian rain.
00:14My daddy, I can't remember from day one when I was born, I don't remember.
00:19He was nowhere around me, period.
00:21And for many years, I didn't even know what he looked like.
00:24All I knew he was black and he had a mouth full of gold.
00:27And every man I seen with an Indian suit on, black and a mouth full of gold, I thought it was him.
00:33My daddy was great in his way, but he never made the stuff that I made.
00:42I never experienced the White Carnival.
00:45Maybe when I was a child, I used to go to the parade.
00:47Before I started massing as an American Indian.
00:51Experiencing the White Carnival was hard for us because we wouldn't accept it.
00:56The idea of all this was for us to maintain our culture.
01:00That came with us from Africa.
01:02Because if we said anything about Africa, we'd all have been dead.
01:06In all the PR and stuff that has been done, folks have constantly said that he's the chief of the Yellow Pocahontas tribe.
01:16And that's not so.
01:20I'm the chief of the Yellow Pocahontas tribe.
01:22And I know my daddy's a proud person.
01:25Really, to me, it never really mattered what anybody else thought about what I looked like.
01:33I never heard my daddy tell me that you're pretty.
01:39There ain't nobody in this city that makes a suit with so much of them in it like I do.
01:51Nobody.
01:53Nobody.
01:55I'm more serious now about this suit here because I made it one years old.
02:01And my time is shorter than it's ever been.