John Daly
Our ‘Kindred Spirits’ in the American Indian Choctaw Nation
I’M NO expert on sculpture, but I know when something hits me in the heart. Seen in the fading sunlight of a dusky March evening, the ‘Kindred Spirits’ monument in Midleton’s Bailick Park is surely one of the country’s most arresting artistic visions.
A circle of nine eagle feathers reaching to the heavens, it embodies an indelible message of how generosity and humanity can triumph over adversity and suffering even in the most dire of circumstances. Fashioned by 20,000 welds to appear from a distance imperfect and fragile, it reveals instead as rugged and staunch – like the bonds of the two nations which inspired its creation. Representing the humanity of one tribe toward the heartache of another in a time of national tragedy, it speaks, like all great art should, directly to the soul. When our Taoiseach later this week thanks the American Indian Choctaw tribe for its generosity to Ireland’s plight during the Great Famine, it will stand in profound contrast to the otherwise manic Paddywhackery that often marks our foremost national holiday. In the worst year of the Famine, 1847, the Choctaw tribe gathered $170 for a starving people “many moons and a great ocean away”.
It wasn’t so much the money – though that would equal many thousands today – but the brotherly compassion behind it that spoke so eloquently of how the world should be.
“It reminds me of who we are as Choctaw people – humanitarians who have always looked out for the betterment of unknown brothers in faraway lands,” said the Choctaw Nation Chief, Gary Batton, of his ancestors’ historic generosity.
It was a gesture made all the more significant given that half the Choctaw nation itself had been wiped out 16 years earlier on its forced march along the infamous Trail of Tears.
Evicted from its ancestral lands in Alabama and Florida by president Andrew Jackson, America’s seventh occupant of the White House whose parents, ironically, had emigrated from Co Antrim in 1765, the Choctaw lost 20,000 to disease and starvation on the 800km journey during one of the worst winters in history.
Victims of the infamous Manifest Destiny that saw European settlers – many of whom were Irish – placed on American Indian territories all across the continent, it was a tragedy French historian Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed first-hand: “In the whole scene there was an air of ruin and destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu that wrung one’s heart.”
Even more ironically, many of the US army soldiers marshalling that death march were themselves of Irish extraction.
As a lesson on the ideals of kinship and fraternity, the Choctaw’s noble generosity speaks louder than a thousand sermons.