COR AD COR LOQUITOR
“Heart Speaks to Heart”
St. Francis de Sales
Three cheers for the Irish!
Not the football, phony Irish or their never-went-there followers. (Miami Hurricane fans will never forgive their 1988 cheating!)
The real Irish.
Few can fancy-up or subtle-ize a curse like the Irish.
May those who love you, love you.
And those that don't love you,
May God turn their hearts
So that they will love you.
And, if they still refuse to love you,
May He turn their ankles,
So we'll know them by their limp.
Or try this one.
May you never have a day of luck!
And, while they rarely forget an insult and can harbor a grudge for generations, they will always remember a kindness.
Few treasure their history more tragically and more poetically than the Irish. Generations after the Great Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852) forced history’s first modern mass migration, poet Seamus Heaney recalls the desperation of the Irish peasant whose very survival depended on a harvest that, year after year, was destroyed by blight:
Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on
wild higgledy skeletons
scoured the land in 'forty-five,'
wolfed the blighted root and died.
The new potato, sound as stone,
putrified when it had lain
three days in the long clay pit.
Millions rotted along with it.
Mouths tightened in, eyes died hard,
faces chilled to a plucked bird.
In a million wicker huts
beaks of famine snipped at guts.
A people hungering from birth,
grubbing, like plants, in the bitch earth,
were grafted with a great sorrow.
Hope rotted like a marrow.
Stinking potatoes fouled the land,
pits turned pus in filthy mounds:
and where potato diggers are
you still smell the running sore.
Yet, from across the Atlantic and half-a-continent away, aid came to those “live skulls” as “eyes died hard” - from the most unexpected of places.
In 1830, more than a decade before the potato blight ravaged Ireland’s subsistence farmers, the Choctaw - under threat of invasion by the U.S. Army - became the first Native Americans to be forced from their land – clearing way for white settlers hoping to make their fortunes by growing cotton. Ultimately joined by Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek and Cherokee peoples – “the Five Civilized Tribes,” whose ancestral homes were located in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina Florida and Tennessee – were driven west to the “Indian colonization zone” – “Indian territory” located in present-day Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa.
In 1838, President Martin Van Buren ordered General Winfield Scott and 7,000 soldiers to expedite the removal of Georgia’s Cherokees, who were forced into blockades at bayonet point while whites looted their homes and belongings, before being marched 1,200 miles to “Indian Territory.” Historians estimate that more than 5,000 Cherokee died as a result of the forced migration.
More than one-out-of-five of the 15,000 Creeks who embarked on “the Trail of Tears and Death” did not survive the journey – “bound in chains and marched double file,” according to one historian. In addition to the overwhelming challenges of the journey, whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera and starvation ravaged the migrants.
The Trail of Tears stretched over 5,000 miles and covered nine present-day states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carlina, Oklahoma and Tennessee. By 1840, tens of thousands of Indigenous Americans had been driven across the Mississippi into the new “Indian Territory.”
“The Great Hunger” began in 1845 when a fungus-like organism invaded the fields of Ireland – then a colony of Great Britain, ruining up to half of the potato crop that year and about three-quarters of the crop over the next seven years.
Between 1845 and 1852, starvation and hunger-induced disease claimed an estimated one million men, women and children – mostly poor, tenant subsistence farmers living in stone and mud hovels.
In the decade beginning in 1845, more than 1.5 million adults and children fled hunger in Ireland seeking refuge in America, most settling in Boston, New York and other cities, where they faced anti-Catholic prejudice and difficulties – but not as terrifying as the conditions in Ireland. Census figures show an Irish population of 8.2 million in 1841, 6.6 million a decade later, and only 4.7 million in 1891. It is estimated that as many as 4.5 million Irish arrived in America between 1820 and 1930.
The potato famine became one of the first humanitarian crises reported in the earliest days of global media.
The relationship between the Choctaw and the Irish began in 1847, when the displaced Native Americans – only recently arrived in present-day Oklahoma after the Trail of Tears - learned of the plight of Ireland’s peasants and sent $170 – about $5,000 today - to starving Irish families of Midleton in County Cork, south of Dublin. The money was distributed by local Quakers, who assumed a leading role in famine relief. At the time, it was one of the largest donations to Irelands poor – from one of the world’s smallest and poorest nations. Donations were also sent from inmates at Sing Sing and other prisons.
One-hundred-and-seventy-three years later, two ancient peoples are again bound by the power of kindness.
COVID-19 death tolls have been especially devastating among Navajo and Hopi communities. A lack of easy access to food, the high prevalence of diseases like diabetes, a lack of running water and homes with multiple generations living under the same roof have contributed to some of the worst outbreaks of the virus in the Hopi reservation, which is surrounded by the Navajo Nation.
By late October, the Navajo Nation – stretching 27,000 square miles across the Southwest and unfolding in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah – had a higher per capital death rate than any U.S. state. Despite a downward turn in infection and death rates during the summer, recent weeks have seen a new uptick in the area over 156,000 Diné (as the Navajo people call themselves) call home.
The Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund Gofundme page opened this Spring. By mid-November the fund had raised more than $6 million to help supply clean water, health supplies and food in the Navajo nation of 180,000 people with only 13 grocery stores and in the Hopi territory with only three small markets to serve some 3,000 people. In forty-eight hours after the fund opened, the people of Ireland donated more than half-a-million dollars and their generosity has continued.
“Adversity often brings out the best in people,” said Gary Batton, chief of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. “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. Our word for their selfless act is ‘iyyikowa’— it means serving those in need. We have become kindred spirts 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.”
“In our darkest hour, your ancestors taught us the meaning of unadulterated altruism – 173 years later, it’s not forgotten. It’s very much alive,” wrote Sean McGarry, an Irish donator to the Gofundme site.
In 2017, the people of Midleton dedicated a stunningly simple sculpture – “Kindred Spirits,” nine giant stainless-steel feathers, shaped into an empty bowl - commemorating the Choctaw and their gift.
“The poor have much to teach you. You must learn from them.”
St. Vincent de Paul (1581-1660)
In the weeks and months after November 3, perhaps the American people, who expelled the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek and Cherokee peoples – “the Five Civilized Tribes,” - from their ancestral lands and despised the Irish immigrants fleeing death, disease and starvation – might do well to remember that simple kindness can reverberate through centuries and across oceans
As a people, as a nation, as citizens and political leaders let us pray with St. Patrick:
May the strength of God pilot us.
May the Power of God preserve us.
May the Wisdom of God instruct us.
May the Hand of God protect us.
May the Way of God direct us.
May the Shield of God defend us.
May the Host of God guard us
Against the snares of the evil ones,
Against temptations of the world.