Tag Archives: Removal

Remembering the Choctaw Gift

In March of 1847, members of the Choctaw Nation in Scullyville, Oklahoma started a fund-raiser for the people of Ireland, who were suffering through the dreadful Famine. The $170 they raised that day and sent to the Irish has been calculated to be the equivalent of over   $ 4,000 today—an amazing act of generosity from a community just ten years after their own removal from their homelands to the east by the US government.

Today, June 18, 2017, the town worthies of Cork, Ireland—along with their fellow citizens and a 19 member delegation from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma—will dedicate a sculpture the Irish people have erected to honor the Choctaws’ gift.

Cliodhna Russell, writing for the Irish online publication thejournal.ie, reports that the sculpture, ‘Kindred Spirits,’  was made by Cork based sculptor Alex Pentek after the city of Cork commissioned it in 2013 to commemorate the donation:

“It has nine 20 foot eagle feathers arranged in a circle shape reaching towards the sky, representing a bowl filled with food.”

The town will host a celebratory unveiling today at 2 PM, led by Choctaw Nation Chief Gary Batton and  Joe McCarthy, East Cork Municipal District Officer.

It was Joe McCarthy who perhaps best articulated what that gift in 1847 meant to his community: “The Choctaw people were still recovering from their own injustice, and they put their hands in their pockets and they helped strangers. It’s rare to see such generosity. It had to be acknowledged.”

In an 1850 publication, Sketch Book, an artist known only as LLDB drew an image of Irish men, women, and children waiting in line for a meal made possible by the Choctaws’ gift.

The National Library of Ireland houses this book and offers these comments about its provenance: “Entitled “Beggars and peasants assembled for Indian meal, July 1847”; signed ‘LLDB’, it is an image of people queuing for food at Poulacurra House (it is It is unclear where the location of the house was – there is however a place called Poulacurra in Glanmire, Co. Cork).

 

Today, the people of Cork are doing much better, and to commemorate their Choctaw friends’ help, they have dedicated much more than a monument to generosity; they have made a statement of repatriation, offering a portion of their own homeland to the Choctaw Nation.

“Kindred Spirits” (Cliodhna Russell, thejournal.ie)