Kindred Spirits Monument/Google Maps Street ViewBy CHEYENNE HASLETT, ABC NEWS
(NEW YORK) — A relationship between Native Americans and Ireland that dates back nearly two centuries has been revived once again during a time of desperate need.
A GoFundMe page for Navajo and Hopi families devastated by coronavirus has raised over $2.6 million as of Wednesday, in no small part because of the hundreds of donations coming from names like O’Neill, Hanrahan, O’Leary and Munro.
“At Ireland’s time of need during the Great Hunger of the 1840s, Native American people donated to the famine relief effort even though they themselves were still living in hardship. Their generosity will never be forgotten,” Dermot Burke wrote on the GoFundMe page on May 3, along with a $30 donation to the Navajo and Hopi relief efforts.
“When Ireland was in need you understood what Solidarity really looked like,” read the following message from Alan Hopkins, along with $20.
Navajo Nation has seen an increasingly challenging rise of coronavirus cases since the outbreak began in early March, spreading quickly and severely on a reservation that lacks running water for nearly a third of residents, creating barriers to hand-washing, and where crowded multi-generational homes can make social distancing all but impossible.
Navajo Nation, which has access to only about 20 intensive care unit beds for a population of nearly 30,000, has pressed for help from the federal government in combating the spread. Neither the Navajo nor any tribes had received any of the $8 billion of aid granted to them in the CARES Act, the nation’s coronavirus relief package, until Tuesday, and tribes are still waiting on 40% of the funds.
“The heartache is real. We have lost so many of our sacred Navajo elders and youth to COVID-19. It is truly devastating. And a dark time in history for our Nation,” Vanessa Tulley, an organizer for the Navajo and Hopi family fundraiser, wrote on the GoFundMe page in May.
“In moments like these, we are so grateful for the love and support we have received from all around the world. Acts of kindness from indigenous ancestors passed being reciprocated nearly 200 years later through blood memory and interconnectedness. Thank you, IRELAND, for showing solidarity and being here for us,” she wrote, as donations from across the pond continued to roll in.
The connection between Ireland and Native American tribes dates back to 1847, when the Choctaw Nation raised $170, which translates to $5,350 today, for a relief fund that was sending food and clothing from the U.S. to Ireland during the Great Famine, which was estimated to have killed 1 million people during the 1840s.
“Adversity often brings out the best in people. We are gratified — and perhaps not at all surprised — to learn of the assistance our special friends, the Irish, are giving to the Navajo and Hopi nations,” the Choctaw tribe said in a statement to ABC News. “Our word for their selfless act is ‘iyyikowa’ — it means serving those in need. We have become kindred spirits with the Irish in the years since the Irish Potato Famine. We hope the Irish, Navajo and Hopi peoples develop lasting friendships, as we have. Sharing our cultures makes the world grow smaller.”
At the time, the Choctaw tribe was suffering from the toll the Trail of Tears had taken on its own population. Nearly a quarter of the tribe was wiped out by the 600-mile trek from areas in the Southeast to territory west of the Mississippi after being forcibly evicted from their land by the U.S. government between 1830 and 1834.
In the decades since, Choctaw Nation and Ireland have kept up the relationship, continuing to use it to remember the suffering that entwines the two nations’ experiences. In 1992, more than 20 Irish men and women walked the Trail of Tears, raising relief funds for a famine in Somalia, and a few years later, Gary White Deer, a member of the Choctaw Nation, led an annual Famine Walk in Ireland, according to the Irish Times.
Then, in 2017, the Irish honored the Choctaw nation with the Kindred Spirits Choctaw Monument, an art installation in Midleton, Ireland, to commemorate the Choctaw donation during the potato famine.
“After we lost a fourth of our people coming across the Trail of Tears, we turned around and sent $170 over to the people of Ireland. Now, to me that’s true servant leadership. That’s a type of values that I want to pass on to my kids and to my grandkids,” Choctaw Chief Gary Batton said at the time the monument was installed.
“It makes me honored to represent the people that does those type of efforts.”
Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.