The Indians and the Irish

Image copyright Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma; all rights reserved.

About an eighth of the blood running through my veins comes from the Emerald Isle. Not much, true, but enough for me to feel some connection to that land, as well.

Sometimes, there are connections between our various peoples that are more ephemeral, yet more tangible — certainly more accessible — than the mixed blood that gives life to some of us.

This is one such connection.

The Choctaw, of course, are not my own particular blood. They come from a different part of this land — a land where they no longer live, thanks to the genocidal removal policy of the occupiers of that land (and all the rest of it).

But despite "removal" — such a polite, sanitized, antiseptic term! — the Choctaw not only survived, but thrived, and maintain a large and vibrant culture: With nearly 200,000 members, they are now the third-largest tribal nation in terms of membership. But what most people don't know is that, fewer than 20 years after losing huge numbers of their own during the forced march of their "removal," they heard the story of another people, half a world away, facing extermination from a different source.

And they decided to do something about it.

First, a couple of sentences of the history here. 

The Choctaw were one of the tribes forcibly marched along the Trail of Tears beginning in 1830. From the tribal nation's Web site:

In 1831 the Choctaw Indians were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in Mississippi to what is now known as Oklahoma. The Choctaws were the first of several tribes to make the trek along The Trail of Tears. The years during and immediately following this journey were very difficult for the tribal people. The winter of this particular Trail of Tears was the coldest on record - the food and clothing of the people were severely inadequate and transportation needs were not properly met. Many of the Choctaws did not survive the trip, and those that did not perish faced hardships establishing new homes, schools, and churches.

Keep in mind that at this point, basic survival was an open question: The makers of official U.S. Indian policy would have been quite happy with extermination. And yet, the Choctaw found room for concern for others — others they had never met, and never would, and some of whom were no doubt blood relations of the very people setting and carrying out the policies of removal.

In 1847, Ireland was in the middle of the Great Hunger, or An Gorta Mór. The seeds of starvation were planted in 1845, with a toxic British trade policy that expropriated Irish crops for export, leaving Irish citizens with potato as its only domestically consumable crop. In 1847, potato blight struck Ireland's crops, destroying the people's primary source of food. By the end of the years of starvation and accompanying disease, put variously between 1849 and 1851, the citizenry was worse than decimated: More than one million people (more than an eighth of the population) were dead; another million had emigrated in desperation. The combined loss amounted to some 25% of Ireland's population. 

Perhaps the stories that managed to cross the Atlantic and then filter into Oklahoma were simply too familiar. Perhaps the Choctaw intuited a similarity of treatment, of being colonized, then outcast, then (at best) abandoned:

The Irish famine relief effort was constrained less by poverty than by ideology and public opinion. Too much was expected of the Irish themselves, including Irish landlords. Too much was blamed on their dishonesty and laziness. Too much time was lost on public works as the main vehicle of relief. By the time food was reaching the starving through the soup kitchens, they were already vulnerable to infectious diseases, against which the medical science of the day was virtually helpless. Too much was made of the antisocial behavior inevitable in such crisis conditions. Too many people in high places believed that this was a time when, as the Times put it, “something like harshness is the greatest humanity”. … Most important, public spending on relief went nowhere near the cost of plugging the gap left by the failure of the potato. … a shortfall of about £50 million in money. … exchequer spending on famine relief between 1846 and 1852 totaled less than £10 million. [Cormac Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and beyond: the Great Irish Famine in history, economy, and memory (Princeton NJ 1998) 82–3]

It's a form of "humanity" that would certainly be recognizeable to those Choctaw who had survived the Trail of Tears.

Whatever their thoughts on the matter, the Choctaw were clearly moved by the news of the starving people half a world away, and moved not merely to tears, but to action. In 1847, the people worked to scrape together all the money they could spare; $170. It sounds today like a meager amount, but in the mid-19th Century, on an Indian Reservation, raised by one people who had narrowly survived being marked for extermination to give to another people fighting to survive being marked for extermination?

One hundred seventy dollars was the world.

And Ireland has not forgotten.

In 1992, a memorial plaque was installed at the Lord Mayor's home in Dublin. It reads, in part: 

Their humanity calls us to remember the millions of human beings throughout our world today who die of hunger and hunger-related illness in a world of plenty.

In 1995, Mary Robinson, then President of Ireland (and later the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights), made an official visit to the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Her purpose was to thank, personally, the descendants of the people who had made it possible for some of her own people's ancestors to survive. In her public statement, she noted that their peoples shared "a common humanity, a common sense of another people suffering as the Choctaw Nation had suffered when being removed from their tribal land."

The Choctaw Nation has not forgotten, either. 

Today, tribal members say that that act of selflessness more than 150 years ago would be a legacy that "shaped tribal culture." In more recent years, the Choctaw Nation has worked to uphold that legacy, giving repeatedly:

• to the New York City Firefighters Fund after the September 11th attacks in 2001;
• to Save the Children and the American Red Cross for international tsunami relief efforts in 2004;
• to Save the Children and the American Red Cross again, for relief efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005;
• to relief and rebuilding programs in Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010; 
• and to countless other humanitarian projects and causes in the U.S. and elsewhere.

The Choctaw Nation's Web site quotes Chief Gregory E. Pyle:

"It is only right that the tribe share what God has so generously allowed us."

On a day dedicated expressly to (even if mostly only nominally celebrated for) a Christian saint, there would seem to be no better expression of the teachings of the deity St. Patrick claimed to represent than the words of Chief Pyle.