In early May of this year (2020), donors in Ireland contributed some $500,000, in just 48 hours, toward relief efforts for the Navajo and Hopi nations of the American southwest, suffering terribly during this current Coronavirus outbreak. Many of them cited the Choctaw aid given to the Irish people during the Great Famine of 1847 as an inspiration for their gifts. This aid, in the form of $170 - the equivalent of around $5000 today - was collected at a time when the Choctaw themselves were suffering terribly. Forced westward from their homeland in Mississippi, they endured the "Long March" toward what was then Indian Territory, and is now the state of Oklahoma. Government aid, in the form of blankets and food, that was promised to the Choctaw to get them to agree to leave, never materialized. Starvation and suffering were rampant on their forced winter-time exodus, and many died along the way. When the ground was too cold and hard to allow for graves, the bodies of the dead had to be abandoned. Fifteen years later, still plagued by the poverty and suffering resulting from this injustice, an injustice visited upon them by other European and Euro-American peoples, the Choctaw responded to a Quaker call for funds to help the Irish people during their own time of great suffering.

Irish author/artist Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick explores this story in her deeply moving, beautifully told, and beautifully illustrated picture-book, first published in Dublin in 1998. It is the story of Choona, a young Choctaw boy just on the verge of manhood, who learns, through community discussion of this call for aid, the true story of his own people and family's experiences. Hitherto, his parents and great-grandmother - the eldest surviving member of the tribe - had never spoken of the Long March. Angry and confused, at first Choona isn't sure that he wants his family to donate. Why didn't we fight back, he wants to know - why didn't we refuse to leave our land? And why should we care about these people so far away? His great-grandmother explains that their people did what they felt they had to, to survive. Their mistake, she elaborates, was in not sharing their story with their children. The revelation that Choona had an elder brother he never got to meet, an elder brother who died at the age of one, during the Long March, is what changes his perspective. His newfound sense of loss, his realization of what he could have had, if the promised aid had been given to his people, and his elder brother had lived, leads him to decide that aid should be sent...

I read The Long March: The Choctaw's Gift to Irish Famine Relief when it was first published in the states, back in 1999, and I reread it during my children's literature masters programs, which I took at an Irish university. Today, after learning of the recent spate of Irish donations toward the Navajo and Hopi, I reread it again. It is a beautifully told book, one that had me in tears on more than one occasion, and it is beautifully illustrated, in detailed pencil drawings. Fitzpatrick spent a great deal of time visiting with the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma, and the people in her book are based on character studies she did of real Choctaw individuals. The cultural details - the language, the objects used, the social customs - are all authentic, and the result of much research and consultation with the Choctaw. The foreword here is written by Choctaw artist Gary White Deer, and the book comes recommended by Gregory E. Pyle, who was the Choctaw Chief, at the time of publication. I cannot recommend this book highly enough! Informative, engrossing, poignant and uplifting, it is a truly beautiful work, and is one I would push on everyone with an interest in Irish history, Native American history, or in the way in which our deeds, whether as individuals or as a group, echo down through the generations. Choona's great-grandmother says, when addressing the community, that "our help will be like an arrow shot through time. It will land many winters from now to wait as a blessing for our unborn generations." Can there be any better proof of the truth of these words, than the famine relief that the Irish and Choctaw have taken together, in recent decades, or in the recent spate of donations flowing from Ireland to the Najavo and Hopi?

Read this book! It can be found for free on The Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/longmarch00mari

And then donate some money to the Navajo and Hopi, if you can. I know I plan to!:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/NHFC19Relief ( )

In 1847 an impoverished displaced group of Choctaw Indians collected from their meager resources the sum of $170 to send toward food relief for the Irish Potato Famine.
Through the memories of Choona, now known as Tom, who is very, very old, we learn of how he, as a young man, at last learned of that part of his family's history about which no one would speak & yet everyone looked so wounded. The Long March, when his people were forced to walk from Florida to Mississippi all through one fearsome, killing winter.

The Long March is rich in American history & memory. The marvelous drawings create a magically real place. This is a must for anyone who loves looking at other ways to live in community; other ways of teaching the spirit to grow & learning about courage, wisdom & respecting the memories.

This book would be a grat addition to the library indian heritage collection. It could also give students a great perpspective on one of many inidan cultures. ( )

Lesson 18 - Manifest Destiny and the Settling of the West