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  2020-05-12

  Historic donation leads to Choctaw-Ireland scholarship

  “The $170 donated by Choctaw leaders in 1847 — or “Black ’47,” as the Irish who survived the rampant starvation, disease and exposure remembered it — would today have amounted to over $5,000, historians estimate. At that time, the Choctaw were still grappling with their own grief and loss, caused by the abuses of a colonial government a decade earlier, and they appear to have seen their own suffering reflected in a people over 4,000 miles away. The donation has since inspired three visits between heads of state in both nations, the construction of an iconic stainless steel sculpture in Ireland’s County Cork, a poetry collaboration between Choctaw author LeAnne Howe and Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa, dance performances of welcome, music that aspires to merge Irish “trad” with Indigenous rhythms and a scholarship.”