Junkanoo
national cultural festival of The Bahamas on Boxing Day and New Year's Day
Junkanoo (also Jonkonnu, John Canoe) is a festival that originated during the period of African chattel slavery in British American colonies. It is practiced most notably today in the Bahamas, Jamaica and Belize, and historically in North Carolina and Miami, where there have been significant settlements of West Indian people during the post-emancipation era. In the present day, there are considerable variations in performance and spelling of the festival, but the shared elements of masquerade (or masking), drumming, dance, and parading continue.
In many territories, Junkanoo is observed around the week of Christmas. These Christmas-time parades are predominantly showcased in Jamaica. In The Bahamas, it was initially called Junkanoo and is said to date back to the 1700s. There it is celebrated year round. In Belize, where the music is mainstreamed, competition results are hotly contested. In the state of Florida, Junkanoo parades take place in Miami in June and in Key West in October, locales that have black populations including those with roots in the Caribbean.
Origins
The festival is believed to have begun in the Bahamas; however, evidence shows that Junkanoo's origins point strongly to Jamaica and that it later spread throughout the Caribbean as early as the 18th century.
“Junkanoo” enters the record as national cultural festival of The Bahamas on Boxing Day and New Year's Day. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Junkanoo, national and cultural can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1612069. The Library of Congress control number is sh2003005585. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Junkanoo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.