The Warriors of Huracán is Trinidad’s last surviving Black Indian band, part of a transgressive traditional mas culture rooted in the island’s history of slavery and resistance…of master and slave mocking and reinterpreting each other behind costumes and masks, and of the enslaved’s faiths, rhythms and imaginations subverting fierce suppression. Black Indians were the offspring of Africans and Amerindians. Each increasingly commercial Carnival, the Orisha-linked Warriors dance and chant through the streets and across the Savannah stage, rituals of a spiritual nature, wearing mostly black costumes handmade from local corbeau feathers, river beads, chip-chip or snail shells, and cow horns. Though marginalized by Carnival administrators and mass-produced party bands, they reclaim with apt ceremony what was denied during slavery and post-emancipation: the freedom of the individual, and of a people, to choose and celebrate their own spirituality, and to express themselves culturally. 

I have been photographing Black Indian and traditional mas for three decades. Of particular interest is the Black Indian association with Orisha, the once-outlawed spiritual practice I’ve been documenting over the years. I am fascinated by the parallel between the West African masking rites used by Black Indians and how Orisha was practised in secret, to the point of “hiding” within Catholicism. I hope my archives will help us eschew the colonial point of view in favour of our own gaze.