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Get a'@lemonade.com pet and they'll help cover the vet bill for whatever your pet swallowed after you yelled drop it. Parking for the free clinic fills days early. People sleep in their cars for a chance at medical care. If you didn't have remote area medical, what would you do? Sup? No. No other way around. With millions losing insurance, we saw desperation meet compassion. Looks good. Californians got on board for a $33 billion high speed train that was supposed to connect LA to San Francisco by 2020. Instead they have this, an unfinished line connecting with, wait for it, Bakersfield and merced. Why have 20 other countries managed to build high speed rail while America hasn't? We've heard people saying what happened in the past is the past. Failure is not an option. Failure is always an option. Every year on Mardi Gras Day, an extraordinary sight emerges from the back streets of New Orleans. They call themselves Mardi Gras Indians or black masking Indians. And they roam the neighborhoods in dazzling hand sewn suits. This Easter Sunday take in the sights and sounds of one of America's last true secret societies. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. Sharon I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories and in our last minute, an article of faith by evangelist Franklin Graham. Tonight on 60 Minutes. Have you got groons, the mega vitamin mineral nutrient daily pack of gummies ready to give you the boost to take on the world. Generic Brands only contain seven to nine vitamins in one pill. Groons Daily Pack gives you more than 20 vitamins in nutrient dense gummies full of flavor along with 6 grams of prebiotic fiber to support immunity, brain development and developmental growth. With ingredients backed by more than 35,000 research publications, save up to 52%. Off with code F OTW at Gruns co. She loves it hot, HE loves it cool. The Pod by eight Sleep is a smart mattress cover that fits on your bed and keeps each side at the perfect temperature all night long. By staying comfortably warm or cool, the Pod helps you sleep deeper and wake up feeling more rested. Every morning you get daily health insights and a sleep fitness score. Get up to $350. Off with code deepsleep@8sleep.com about 1/3 of Americans say they have skipped meals, borrowed money or cut back on utilities to pay for health care. That's in a Gallup poll released in March. The Trump administration has lowered prices on more than 50 drugs, but it also let premiums rise even double in the affordable care Marketplace and made the biggest cuts ever to Medicaid. Already 3 million have lost insurance, and it's estimated it'll be 10 million in three years. All of this reminded us of our story in 2008 about a charity called Remote Area Medical. RAAM started out parachuting doctors into South American jungles, But in the 1990s it turned to another isolated people Americans cut off from health care by the cost. Recently, we returned to RAM at one of its free pop up clinics. For Americans long on pain and short on hope, RAM is a ray of mercy in the darkness. The parking lot in Knoxville, Tennessee, began to fill early in a frigid February. Many drove hundreds of miles in desperation. Nearby, Remote Area Medical would open a clinic inside an empty exhibit hall. But RAM can take only so many patients on a weekend, so they joined the line days before we met Sandra Talent at 5am Sandra, where'd you come from? Huntsville, Alabama. And how long have you been in the parking lot here? Since 4:30 Wednesday night. Wednesday night? Yeah. So Wednesday night, Thursday night, and this is Friday morning. Two nights sleeping in her car, a 200 mile drive, all for lack of dental insurance. If you didn't have ram, how would you get your teeth taken care of? I wouldn't. A few spaces over, Dave Byrd spent the night in his truck aching for a full set of dentures. What happened to your teeth? Several things. I had a uninsured drunk driver run a red light doing 80, hit me head on. Almost killed me. Two years of rehab and three surgeries and 140,000 later, I was able to go back to work at work. One day, I'm drilling through a basement wall, and the drill hangs up on a piece of rebar, and it comes around, smacks me in the mouth, cracks my jaw, and broken back out again. By then, I was pretty. Pretty thin on money to do much about it, so I didn't have a lot of choices. I just kept working. But working was rare. Employers on construction jobs just assume he lost his teeth to meth addiction. Burge told us his only habits are nicotine and caffeine, and right now, he could use a cup. He's wrapped in four layers against 27 degrees. If you didn't have remote area medical, what would you do? Sup. No other way around. They're life changing. Life changing. When they hand you your life back, that's life changing. That's what teeth mean to me. Starting to be a normal viewing again. I sure do appreciate you. Yes, sir. Thank you. Good luck, Scott. You're dentures. Okay? You're gonna be over here. He had the luck of being near the head of the line, which stretched to 1200 patients in Knoxville over a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Hold on to that. When you go up there for service, you got to bring them that ticket. If you don't. Brad Sands, a former paramedic, is a RAM clinic coordinator. I'm number four. Number four, head on up. Who are the people in the cars? Everybody. I mean, it's your neighbors, it's your parents, it's your friends, it's the community around you. It's everybody. And it's nationwide. Somewhere in America, Brad Sands sets up a clinic like this most every weekend. It's all comers, no questions asked, no insurance needed. You don't even have to give me your real name. We met a woman at a RAM expedition who was so grateful for the help she received. But she said, I just hate to ask. I'm not going to judge your story. Nobody here that's working or volunteering today is going to judge any person that comes through that door. We are here to help. Can you see any of those lines out there? About half of the patients have no insurance. The rest have insurance they can't afford to use because of co pays and deductibles and many health insurance plans. Have no dental. Correct. No vision care. Correct. No hearing care. Correct. This is our triage area. So once Chris hall volunteered at RAM when he was 12 years old. Now he's CEO. So when you look at the patients that come through our door, 65% of those patients are requesting dental service. 30% of those patients are requesting eye exams and glasses. Only 5% are requesting medical care. Dental and vision are two things that are isolated, that people do not have access to or can't afford the access to. Are you a diabetic? There's also screening for blood sugar, blood pressure, breast cancer, skin cancer, and more. Depending on the size of the clinic, RAM will spend between 100,000 and half a million dollars over a weekend. How do you pay for all of this? It's the generosity of the public. Over 81% of our supporters are individual donors. People that write five, ten, twenty dollar checks every month. Those checks are leveraged with donated clinic space, donated supplies and volunteers. 887 volunteers on this Knoxville weekend alone. This sheet here is extremely important. Medical professionals paid their own way from 30 states and brought medical students with them. Treat these patients with dignity, with respect. Talk to them like they're human beings, please. If you ever lose faith in humanity, go spend 10 minutes at a RAM clinic. You're going to see hundreds of people there that are donating their time and they're coming out and they're donating large swaths of their own money slash time to help their neighbors. I remember there was a guy many years ago who had a broken tooth and he told me that he tried to remove it with a screwdriver. So if that doesn't move you to help, you know, that's the desperation. Let's see what we got here. Dentist Glenn Goldstein volunteered from New Jersey. He sees patients suffering from a past without health care and no hope for the future. You know, I've had young people in, you know, I said, well, you know, some of these teeth can be saved. You know that, right? Because, yeah, I don't, I don't care. Please. I don't have any money. I don't have any way to get these fixed. So please, please take them out. I got a bunch of loose tooth and gross tooth and bothering me, so I'm ready to get them all out. And it's heartbreaking to take all the teeth out. It's, it's, it's terrible. Patients ask you to take all of their teeth out. All their teeth, let's see. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 as well. 30 corners, 16. Because they know going forward, they will not be able to take care of them 100%. Relieving pain was the mission of Ram's late founder, an eccentric Englishman, daredevil pilot and Amazon cowboy. Tell me about Stan Brock. Stan was a magnificent leader, magnificent man, humble. We basically had. We met Stan Brock and Ram in 2008. We're very happy that you're here this morning. We've got a lot of really fine volunteer doctors, dentists, eye specialists. It was built. Stan was an adventurer who once walked 26 days in the Amazon to be treated for an injury this November 58514. So he started his airborne medical charity with an army surplus that flew on D day. When we met, he was 72, had no family, took no salary, lived in an office, donated to Ram and showered with a garden hose. He died in 2018 in the office. He was perhaps the most dedicated person I've ever met. I agree with you completely on that. I joked around a lot when I tell people working with Stan. It was really hard to ask for a day off when your boss hadn't had a day off in 20 years. When we met in 2008, Stan Brock was staging 12 clinics a year. After our broadcast, $4 million in donations poured in along with thousands more volunteers. RAM has grown from a dozen to 90 clinics a year. It's because of you and your story back in 2008 that brought me to almost to tears. And as soon as your segment was over about this organization, I immediately went online, looked it up and registered down here. I'm from Jersey. I understand that volunteering at RAM has become a family thing. Yes sir. Yes sir. Got one left. So my son who's here with me now, my wife has been here, my daughter in law, my daughter, my other son, they've all been here a multitude of times. Sounds like you get as much out of this as the patients do. Maybe more. Did you have high blood pressure, anything like that? Only when I'm in pain. Remember Sandra Tallent, the woman we met in her car? And Dave Burge who lost his teeth in two accidents? They're here for dentures. A perfect process that would take weeks were it not for this trailer and the 22 year old engineer who helped build it. Connor Gibson uses computer design to make dentures with 3D printers. They can print a set in an hour or so. Gibson has slept in here to keep the printers running non stop. He's inspired by something he calls the mirror moment. We say it's worth a million dollars, but truly it's priceless. When you give them that mirror, you just see all that stress melt away. And no matter if they're 18 or 80, we see grown men cry sitting in the chair. And so it was for Dave Burch, the man who told us in the parking lot that he wanted to be a normal human again. You're a new man. Thank you. There we go. All right. And the mirror smiled on Sandra Tallente. Looks good. Happy tears. Yeah. What does this moment mean to you? I don't know what I do. You know, The Lord would make a way, but I feel like he has made a way through RAM. Over the Knoxville weekend, RAM allowed more than 500 patients to see 700 live without pain and restored the smiles of 24. With insurance out of reach for growing millions, RAM will hurry to another city to make health in America a little less remote. You look beautiful. Do you think they look pretty? Yeah. You look gorgeous. Good. Seriously good. You look so pretty. Thank you for being here, honey. Have a great day. You, too. Have a great life. Get some sleep. Spring is finally here, and it's that time of year when plans start becoming real. Trips are getting booked, the calendar is filling up, and the energy is shifting. Make this season count. By starting right now, you'll hit summer already feeling more confident speaking and understanding a brand new language. 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Go to Rosetta Stone.com RS10Now and begin your language learning journey. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. It's hard to exaggerate the role of the train in the American story. Or the romance of train travel. Those iron horses galloping down tracks of steel. Why then has high speed rail so common in other countries? Not tracked in the US an ambitious state run project connecting LA and San Francisco has lurched, derailed, cost billions and may never happen. One private company is betting that it can succeed where the public sector is not. But that too has had its bumps. As US high speed rail remains a mirage, a ghost train, it's become a stand in for a broader question. Can America get its act together and still build big things? The very model of modern engineering, it hums across the fruited plains at a top speed of 200 miles an hour. It's revolutionized travel. It's a source of national pride in Morocco. Here in the US high speed rail looks like this. Hardly passenger ready. America's hopes for its first high speed rail were kindled in 2008 when California voters approved a ballot measure for a train connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than three hours. The estimated price tag, $33 billion. Completion date 2020. It Pollution Revitalize local economies. Clear gridlock. Status update. Today the state's high speed rail authority is preparing to lay its first tracks at roughly the same cost, only slight course correction here. Instead of LA to San Francisco, it will run one third of that distance connecting, wait for it, the metropolis of Bakersfield and Merced, population 96,000. Owen, when will it open? 2033 maybe. I think that the California high speed rail nightmare is the probably quintessential example of government waste and mismanagement. You say this needs to stop? Needs to stop. Congressman Vince Fong, a Republican from Bakersfield, sits on the House Transportation Committee. He says that when California voters first approved high speed rail, the promise and price tag were more marketing campaign than realistic projection. We're now in 2026. There are no trains, there's no track laid. It's a complete bait and switch. If I vote for a mansion in Malibu by next year and someone says, actually you know what, in five years we're going to have a doghouse in Modesto, how do things go so off the rails? The business plan that was put out in 2008 was very theoretical. You know, this is what we think is going to happen. And it became very clear that they didn't have the specifics. It worked out, this project. On that point, management doesn't disagree. Togs Amoshakin is California's Secretary of Transportation and Anthony Williams, a rail authority board member. Both are relatively new to the job, left to answer for their predecessors. There Were mistakes made. Some of the criticism on this project I think are very fair. What happened, I don't think the voters fully understood, neither did we in the public sector, what it was going to take to actually get this project delivered, to get the necessary political buy in from the whole state. The plan called for the train to run inland, threading the farmland of the Central Valley. Yet the rail authority hadn't answered basic questions like precisely where it could lay down its tracks, what's known as right of way. 3000 parcels had to be negotiated just for the segments that we're working on today in the Central Valley. It seems to me one farmer doesn't want high speed rail going through his field and you've got a guy that can gum up the works for a long time. Yeah, that's what happens sometimes in these processes. More snarl California's exacting environmental regulations, which triggered all manner of reviews, lawsuits and delays. As anyone who's renovated a home knows, delay adds to price. So do the high US labor and construction costs, at least compared to many other countries. And while the federal government contributed modestly under the Obama and Biden administrations, the burden fell largely on the state. When construction started, was the financing there to complete this rail? It wasn't. Let's be real. We had a lot to learn and we had a lot of growth to do. And you know, it's arguable whether, you know, we should have been clearer about that by 2019. Costs ballooning in the timeline, years off schedule. Bipartisan political pressure mounte. Newly elected Governor Gavin Newsom said this in his first state of the state. Right now there simply isn't a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to la. Under Newsom, who didn't respond to repeated interview requests, California decided to focus on that initial Central Valley segment, a route few clamored for and fewer are likely to ride, though the ultimate goal remains connecting Northern and Southern California. When you have a project like this and when the budget no longer permits you to finish it the way you want it to, you start cutting off your arms and legs. Lew Thompson helped found Amtrak in the 1970s and until 2024 sat on California's high Speed rail peer review group. We've heard people say, time to cut bait. We've heard people saying, what happened in the past is the past. Failure is not an option. Failure is always an option. Is that what's going to happen here? No, I don't think so. But I think what will happen in the short range is that they will cut back and do the best they can with the money they have available. Here outside Fresno, in California's Central Valley, one of the few signs of concrete progress, Literally, structures like this. Locals here jokingly refer to it as the their own Stonehenge. Ideally, these bridges and viaducts will one day be used to support California high speed rail. But for now, these are curiosities in a field, Monuments to promises that haven't been met and plans that haven't been executed. Ironic, because American rail was once the world's envy. In the 1800s, the US government oversaw the birth of the transcontinental railroad, stitching the country together as it expanded westward. We turn to the future. In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration decided that the transportation vanguard was off the tracks, creating and critically continuously funding the interstate highway system. And the family car is in tip top shape, fueling the world's proudest car culture. Meanwhile, Japan's famous bullet train opened in 1964. And today more than 20 countries have high speed rail, generally defined as cruising at 150 miles an hour or more. Yes, Germany and France and China, but also Turkey, Indonesia, Egypt has broken ground. The obvious question there is like, how can it be that we can't get it done and they can get it done right? We know we can do this. It's an economic engine. Mike Reininger is managing director, Brightline West, a private company that believes it can achieve what California hasn't. Oh, wow. Next stop, Zurich. This is like a European train system. This train, which opened in 2018 and runs between Miami and Orlando, hits top speeds of around 125 miles an hour. Not quite high speed, but close. It's akin to a beta test for Brightline's next project, a bullet train connecting LA and Las Vegas. In just over two hours, a trip that can take five hours by car, Brightline west will be true high speed rail. First time in the country and we'll operate at speeds of about 200 miles an hour maximum. Out west, Brightline is solving the right of way issue by running on the median of the I15 highway. Construction has already begun on some of the station structures. The plan is to start service in 2029. What are you telling people? To get them out of their cars or getting them to avoid the airport? It's more enjoyable, it's safer, it's reliable. This really is all about changing people's behavior. You don't think we're just. This car culture is intractable. It's so hardened and it's so much a part of the American psyche. It just can't be cracked. I don't think so at all. Culture. Cultural questions aside, Brightline's Florida trains run at street level through crowded neighborhoods. And according to numbers compiled by the Miami Herald and local public radio, more than 200 people have been hit and killed by the trains in the near decades since operations began. Brightline says that running rail in the desert out west, where track crossings won't be at street level, will be a safer proposition. Then there are the finances. The stratospheric costs of building and running a rail line vastly outstrip revenues. Analysts have downgraded Bright Lines debt to junk, raising questions about private rail as a business. To what extent? Big picture. Do you worry about the future financial viability of Brightline? The business has built slower than we originally expected it to build. We thought we would be carrying more passengers today than we are. The business is, in fact, growing month over month, year over year. That's a great thing that solidifies in our mind the viability of the business. Brightline's west coast project has already received some federal funding and is hoping for a $6 billion loan from the Trump administration. If you look around the world, for the most part, the infrastructure systems are funded by the public sector. You do see a role for government here? Absolutely. We welcome it back. In California, the rail authority insists state funds can cover the cost of the Central Valley leg. As for the rest, just to be clear as we speak right now, are the funds there to complete LA to San Francisco, the entire amount of money we need, not there today. But do we believe we can get those funds to get the project done? Absolutely. How much do you estimate it's going to cost to connect high speed rail San Francisco to LA today? We estimate, with the right optimization, just over $125 billion. I think $126 billion is the current estimate for that. That's more funding than Amtrak has received in its history and still leaves a shortfall of roughly $90 billion. That's a big gap to fill. It is a big gap to fill, but again, we have an understanding of how to get there and to fill that gap. A gap the authority hopes to fill with a new plan to cut costs, lure private investment, and connect to bigger cities much sooner. But there's another challenge to building anything today. The swirling winds of a political climate in which one party pushes and the other reflexively. Polls remember Gavin Newsom's pessimism. In recent months, he's championed the project. This is not just a transportation project. This is about reimagining the future of this region. Meanwhile, in 2025, President Trump canceled $4 billion in federal grants for the train, swiping at a political nemesis in the process. Did you ever hear of Gavin Newscombe? He has got that train is the worst cost overrun I've ever seen. In a statement to 60 Minutes, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said the administration is in favor of high speed rail, but this project has, quote, wasted billions in taxpayer dollars yet delivered nothing. Can this be done without help from the federal government, this initial segment? We believe so. The ultimate 494 miles of building this out without the federal government's help will be challenging. There's no doubt about that. Is this a non starter to build a project like this without federal funding? Well, not only can't it be done, it shouldn't be done because a lot of the benefits of the project, the reason why you build a project is public pollution reduction, congestion reduction, improved safety, comfort, reliability. All of those things are public benefits. There are other ideas for us high speed rail, say Dallas to Houston, but nothing else in the building stage. Leaving that uneasy overarching question, Morocco has high speed rail and Serbia and China and Japan and Western Europe. Why don't we? What's your simple answer? Well, the simple answer is they've decided they want to do it and pay for it and we haven't. You think we will in our lifetimes? I don't know. I'm dubious. I'm dubious, absent a national political will to work with the states to create some of these systems. I think it's going to be in of course, my lifetime. Almost certainly not. But maybe yours. I don't know. Real skin results start with one daily ritual Meet daily Microfoliant from Dermalogica. This iconic exfoliating powder activates with water to gently polish away dullness and uneven texture. It leaves skin instantly smoother and more luminous while supporting your skin barrier. Formulated with professional expertise to deliver visible results daily, even on sensitive skin. Discover your healthiest skin today. Visit dermalogica.com and use code Smooth at checkout for an exclusive gift with your $65 purchase. Your next chapter in healthcare starts at Carrington College's School of Nursing in Portland. Join us for our open house on Tuesday, January 13th. From 4 to 7pm you'll tour our campus, see live demos, meet instructors and learn about our Associate degree in Nursing program that prepares you to become a registered nurse. Take the first step toward your nursing career. Save your spot now at Carrington Edu Events. For information on program outcomes, visit carrington. Edu sci. Every year on Mardi Gras morning, something extraordinary emerges from the back streets of New Orleans. Groups of black revelers most tourists will never see. They call themselves Mardi Gras Indians or black masking Indians, and they roam the city's neighborhoods in dazzling hand sewn suits. The tradition dates to the 1800s as a way to honor their ancestors. And according to Mardi Gras, Indian lore is rooted in profound respect for Native Americans said to have sheltered enslaved Africans who had escaped. It's an expression of joy, protest, and pride passed from generation to generation. On this Easter Sunday, you'll meet the artists and musicians preserving the culture and take in the sights and sounds of one of America's last true secret societies. If you're lucky enough to find them, you'll discover a vibrant tapestry of African, Caribbean and Native American threads. Part of the cultural gumbo that is New Orleans. These extravagant suits, plumed, bejeweled, beaded and sequined, are handcrafted in secret for an entire year to be unique, unveiled on Mardi Gras day. Chawa. That's big Chief Daman Milanson of the Young Seminole hunters announcing his arrival. Chawa. Who the best? Who got the best beadwork? Who got the best rhinestones? Who could sing the best? Who got the biggest tribe? Who don't. That's what it is. There are dozens of calling themselves tribes. The leader is known as the big chief, who, along with his big queen and their crew, strut through historically black neighborhoods searching for other tribes. When big chief Daman meets another big chief, they square off in mock battle, competing to show whose suit is, in their words, the prettiest. We saw Daman face down tribes all over the city. What just happened back there? Look like he just bowed out. But you won. Yeah, I think I. You were the prettiest. Yeah. Yeah. Cause we on fire, we on fire, we on fire. Who are you? On Mardi Gras day, when I put that suit on, I'm basically the mom alone, so called his Is that different? Different from the Dumond who's sitting here in front of me now? Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. How different? Somebody that's ready to honor everything that I was taught by my elders. And I'm ready to kill you dead with the needle and thread. Needle and thread. To do the work of his heart and hands, Big Chief Damond and his wife Alicia, meticulous as surgeons, sew beads the size of chia seeds on a canvas and stitch rhinestones in place with dental floss, Painting with beads, making artwork for his suit. What to you makes a suit pretty? The hookup. What do you mean? How it's laid out, how the velvet gets around it. How you break the feathers, how you manipulate the feathers. How many rows of rhinestones you have around the beadwork. That's the perfection of knowing your hookup. If you're that good. Oh, wow. This year's suit tells the story of the Amistad, a slave ship seized by the captive Africans in 1839. Led by a man called Sin Kay, this panel shows when the Africans won their freedom in a case that went to the U.S. supreme Court. Look at this. John Quincy Adams. He was one of the lawyers on the case. My God. So you're doing this, like, nonstop. I sold some six in the morning, at 12 at night. And this is every day? Every day? Every day. Why? I said, man, without these beads, I couldn't breathe. And every breath is hard earned. It can take thousands of dollars and thousands of hours to design and sew a suit. For years, big Chief Damond was laying concrete and cooking lobsters, pouring all his spare time and money into his creations. He now makes a living as an artist. This year's suit cost $25,000. But this flamboyant display is not a beauty pageant. It's the flowering of deep roots. The community is what makes me. It's my fuel, the people. Your fuel? Yeah, it fuels the fire because you're doing it for them like you do this for your community and your people. It is the greatest kept secret in America and throughout the world today is the Mardi Gras Indian culture. These cultures date back to slavery days. I have hope. Howard Miller is the president of the Mardi Gras Indian Council, a governing body for the tribes and chief of the Creole Wild West. He told us it's a culture shaped by resistance to oppression and sustained by resilience. How would you explain the Mardi Gras Indians to people who don't have a clue what they're about? Well, we weren't allowed to go to those big parades and stuff. So this, in our community, was about uplifting our people in a proudly manner. There's no one definitive origin story, but historians have found references to the tradition dating back to the mid-1800s. According to stories passed down through generations, when enslaved people escaped New Orleans, Native Americans in the bayous gave them refuge. Today, many tribe members claim indigenous and African roots. Masking, some say, began as a way to honor those indigenous tribes while disguising or masking their African identity. Because here in America, especially here in the south, everything about Africa was forbidden. So we went behind our mask as Indians to practice our culture. Was it easy to join a tribe? No, it wasn't. In 1969, it took then 12 year old Howard Miller six weeks just to get in the door of a big chief's house, the tribe's headquarters. I had a friend of mine, he was in it and I would go around there with him trying to get in, but they wouldn't let me in the gate. Wouldn't even let you in the gate? No, I had to stay outside the yard while he go in there. Eventually I got on the porch and I was watching all this here magic with the suits and what they was doing and it started. Rainstorm, thunder, lightning, raining hard, I'm getting wet. And the chief said, is that boy still on the porch? And somebody said, yep, tell that boy to come on in here. That's how I got in the house. We visited the home of Joseph Pierre Boudreau, better known as big Chief Monk of the Golden Eagles tribe. Big chiefs aren't just heads of their tribes. They're mentors and community leaders. And big chief Monk is one of the most respected. But the working class neighborhoods that sustain the tribes have been thinned and scattered by hurricane Katrina and gentrification. 84 year old monk Boudreau is determined to hold on to the community and legacy and is Preparing for his 72nd year of masking. We gonna do it, we gon do it. Let the world know that we here, that we've been here. We ain't just got here, we've been here. We joined the Boudreaux in a sewing circle before Mardi Gras. For decades, big chief Monk sewed suits for his children and grandchildren. This year they gathered and helped him sew his. My whole family's talent, you know, by just sitting there watching me for all these years. You know, as kids it was always right there while I was sewing. Sitting right there. All those long hours of sewing inspired a song. In the 1970s, Monk was one of the first to marry Mardi Gras Indian chants to New Orleans funk. His albums earned two Grammy nominations. His son Joseph and grandson Juan often sang backup. We met them, Monk's daughter Wynoka and grandson Marwan at one of Monk's favorite New Orleans clubs, Tipitina's. What's his impact on the culture? The impact that Michael Jordan had on basketball? Yeah, I'll put it like that, like that. You can't Mention Mardi Gras without Monk, our achievement. I never saw him take a break. Like, I never saw him say, oh, this year, I'm not coming. You know, my father, he took something that was made for the culture in the streets, and he was one of the pioneers that took it global. There's not a person in the city of New Orleans that sews an Indian suit, and they don't put on his music. Big Chief Damani included. That man make me cry. He do me something. He's moved by the music, and the weight of his call in the expense almost left him destitute. You sacrificed a lot to make these suits. You lost a house because you were so consumed with making your suit. Yeah. Yeah, because it's hard. I know it's hard, but it's hard. Losing the house didn't make you stop. What? Why? Why? Because you got put out of your house? No, indeed. I'm preserving the culture. And the fine art world has taken notice. His suits and beaded portraits have been displayed in museums and galleries all over the world. It's allowed him to buy a new house, every inch of which was covered with plumes and patches the evening before Mardi Gras. Y' all ready? After working through the night, Big Chief Demond emerged, transformed, in a suit that stood more than 10ft tall and weighed 120 pounds. He used a U haul to move from place to place. But he tells us there was something else carrying him along. The spirits come down every time we put it on, especially with me. You know, my elders live through me. And it's an opening of the gates. What do you mean? That means they came down, they coming through me. To walk in their shoes on the streets of New Orleans like they taught us. So what we doing is we preserving it for that next generation to be able to walk like I walk. It's going to change my life. The spirits, it seems, are opening other gates for it. His work will be featured next month at the Venice Biennale in Italy, the world's most prestigious art exhibition. Do you think your success in the art world will encourage a younger generation to carry on with this culture? I pray it does. And I pray one of them picks up Anita and won't do what I do. You know, preserving tradition for the next generation. We heard that a lot here. It's what Big Chief Monk lives for. But this year, he was too weak to march with his tribe. Just before Mardi Gras, he was diagnosed with cancer. But he came out on his porch to see the tribe off with the Mardi Gras Indian's most sacred hymn. What's it like for you to see your tribe march off and you're not joining them this year? Well, I knew that time was gonna come, but I didn't know when. But you got to see this day. Yeah, right. Well, I was gonna see this day. And the day is coming, he told us for him to pass his crown on to the next chief. Like I say, if you don't keep it going, if you lose it, it's gone forever. Finished. You know, that thing just disappeared. Not here in New Orleans. Not here in New Orleans, no. We keep it rolling. Keeping it rolling and chanting and showing off a culture in full blown bloom. Too pretty, too rooted to fade just yet. The anatomy of a showdown. This warfare, it's basically a battle@60minutes overtime.com. The last minute of 60 Minutes. Evangelist Franklin Graham has preached in all 50 states and provided disaster relief to more than 100 countries. For tonight's reflections on America, we asked Graham which value does he believe shaped the nation the most? Faith. Faith in God is the value that most shaped America. Remember the pilgrims? They came to this land to find freedom to live out their faith. And it's people of faith who have been the bedrock, the driving force behind our nation in years past. Where did people turn after a disaster? Not fema, not to the government. It was the church that took them in, fed them, gave them shelter, clothed them. It was people of faith who established our healthcare in this country. Our higher education was started by people of faith. Harvard, Yale, Princeton were founded to train ministers of the gospel. From the remote villages of Alaska to the tip of the Florida Keys, today you'll find houses of worship and people of faith making a difference. As a follower of Jesus Christ, I want all people to know that God loves them, that he cares for them. So I see faith as the most important defining value in our nation and in every single life. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes. Happy Easter and a joyous Passover. 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