I love stuff like this. Didn’t a tribe in Africa send America some cows after 9/11? Like this is holy and the most valuable thing we have. We hear your suffering and want to do anything in our power to help
It was not a potato famine. The famine didn’t happen because of the potato yield failing. Ireland was actually producing more than enough food. However it was almost all land owned by British landowners, who took all of the food out of the country to sell in UK. Potato was what the Irish farmers ate, because it was cheep and could be produced in worst parts of the land, where more profitable food couldn’t be grown. When there were no longer potatoes, the decision for the farmers was to either starve and sent the food as rent to the landlords or loose their homes and then starve.
The British government was unwilling to do anything for two reasons. First was the laissez-faire capitalistic ideology, that put the rights of property owners to make profits above human lives. Rent freeze was unthinkable and they even were unwilling to do proper relief efforts as free food would lower the cost of food. The second reason was disdain for the Irish, and the thought that they were “breeding too much” and the famine was a natural way to trim down the population, aka genocidal reasoning.
This is why it’s important to stress it was not a potato famine. The potato blight was all over Europe but only in Ireland there was a famine. The reasons behind it had nothing to do with potatoes and everything to do with the British.
Apparently what made Choctaw want to offer relief to Irish was the news about the Doolough Tragedy. Hundreds of starving people were gathered for inspection to verify they were entitled to recieve relief. The officials would for *some reason* not do that and instead left to a hunting lodge 19 kilometers away to spend the night and said to the starving people they would have to walk there by morning to be inspected. The weather conditions were terrible and many of them died completely needlessly during the walk thorough day and night.
This apparently reminded the Choctaw of their own very recent (and much more explicit and bigger scale) experiences of ethnic cleansing, where they were forcibly relocated. It was basically a death march and thousands of Choctaw died from the terrible conditions also completely needlessly.
In 2015 a memorial named Kindred Spirits was installed in city of Midleton in Ireland to commemorate the Choctaw donation.
