SHARING LANDS: RECONCILIATION, RECOGNITION, & RECIPROCITY (Resubmission)

In the winter of 1847, when people in Ireland were entering the third year of a devastating famine, members of the Choctaw Nation met in Skullyville, a small town in Indian Territory. There, members of the tribe discussed the famine blighting Ireland, and it was proposed that they would gather what monies they could spare in the wake of their recent removal from their tribal homelands east of the Mississippi River. Ultimately, they collected $172. Although the tribe were badly in want of resources themselves, having been removed to the new territory just a decade earlier, they made the altogether remarkable decision to send much-needed funds to the starving and destitute in Ireland. That act of enormous generosity was rooted in the Choctaw culture of 'ima' (giving). Ima is a cultural lifeway and is central to a Choctawan sense of being and relationality. While demonstrating the strength, endurance, and centrality of indigenous ways of knowing in the first instance, the gift to the Irish is a true reflection of the tribe's responses to various forms of inequality, food shortage, forced migration, and land loss in the second. This act has had a lasting effect upon the people of Ireland; the 1847 donation was mentioned countless times during the Covid-19 pandemic, as Irish citizens donated millions of euro to The Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund. This project will examine the powerful legacy of the Choctaw famine gift from several perspectives and will be led by senior academics in the fields of Indigenous Studies and Irish Studies.

Over the lifetime of the project, we will concurrently follow five specific strands of enquiry by:
1) considering Choctaw beliefs concerning relationality and reciprocity and how these have led to the development of transatlantic connections and informed non-Indigenous worldviews.
2) examining the ways in which the landscape and storytelling traditions of the Choctaw and the Irish have influenced the memorialisation, celebration, and narration of this connection in the twenty-first century.
3) assessing the Choctaw and Irish community's contemporary responses to the collective cultural trauma that followed their experience of food shortages, forced migration, language loss, depopulation, and institutionalisation.
4) considering the extent to which the Choctaw-Irish relationship continues to inform twenty-first century civic discourse about complex social issues on the national and international stage. These issues include refugee crises, international aid, and the sustainable and ethical management of natural resources (especially food production).
5) ensuring public and institutional awareness of the connection between the Choctaw and the Irish; and informing the framing and telling of this story in museums and other sites.
By bringing these various strands together our project will attend to bodies of knowledge that have not yet been explored during the consideration of the historic and material facts surrounding the 1847 gift. Through our research we will determine and illustrate the extent to which the original gift is part of a living, sustaining relationship that arises out of Choctaw ways of knowing and continues to shape the lived realities of both the tribe and the people of Ireland, while also considering its influences upon urgent responses to the most pressing issues in our time.

There are three key stages:
Firstly, we will create opportunities for citizens of the Choctaw Nation and Ireland, as well as the Irish Diaspora in the UK and the US, to share any stories, memories, and reflections on the significances of the gift.
Secondly, we will provide further context for public understandings of the gift as communities in Oklahoma, Texas, London, and Cork will be invited to workshops, interviews, and symposia.
Thirdly, we build an online, publicly accessible repository that will record our findings and make meeting reports and other documents available to the public.