The House of Dance and Feathers is a community museum in the Lower Ninth Ward dedicated to Mardi Gras Indians, social and pleasure clubs, and the history of the Ninth Ward. The museum’s director and curator, Ronald W. Lewis, is the president of the Big Nine Social and Pleasure Club and the former Council Chief of the Choctaw Hunters. The museum began in 2000 as a small shed in his backyard where neighborhood children came to learn about their culture.

After Katrina, the Tulane City Center and Project Locus, a nonprofit architectural design/build organization, partnered with Lewis to rebuild the museum. Over the summer of 2006, Project Locus, along with architectural students from around the country, rebuilt both the museum and the Lewises' house. Since then, Ronald has rebuilt the collection, and the House of Dance and Feathers is open to the public. In his tours, Ronald presents a history of the Lower Ninth Ward’s musical and parading heritage. He tells stories of migrations from the sugarcane plantations of Southern Louisiana, and the environmental, social, and labor history of the community—the longshoremen, builders, and domestic workers who saved their money to buy homes in the Lower Ninth Ward when it was still surrounded by swamps. Part of the poignancy of this tour comes from his reflections about rebuilding a community twice—once after Hurricane Betsy, and now with Katrina.

The Lower Ninth Ward has become an inevitable part of the disaster tourism in New Orleans. As travelers from all over the U.S. and the world come to see for themselves some of the most dramatically affected areas of the city, they find Ronald’s museum as a place to learn about the communities that were here before the flood, and to learn about social and cultural resilience. Some of these travelers are New Orleanians coming home from far-flung locations for a holiday or a family event. Whether they left during the evacuation or many years before the storm, they come across the museum as a touchstone of social memory and cultural activism, as they consider the city’s history and possibilities for the future.