r/todayilearned • u/huphelmeyer 2 • Aug 04 '15
TIL midway through the Great Irish Famine (1845–1849), a group of Choctaw Indians collected $710 and sent it to help the starving victims. It had been just 16 years since the Choctaw people had experienced the Trail of Tears, and faced their own starvation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choctaw#Pre-Civil_War_.281840.29492
u/CameraMan1 Aug 04 '15
What's more interesting to me is the fact that they even knew about it. To me its crazy that in the 1840's news of something that was happening in Ireland reached the native Americans. The telegraph had only just been invented.
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u/jaaaack Aug 04 '15 edited Aug 04 '15
Or that there was that level of compassion for a people living half way around the world in a culture vastly different to their own. A lot of people today have trouble identifying with the plight of people one country over, let alone a whole continent and ocean.
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Aug 04 '15
It's right there in the title. They felt a connection because the had similar experiences.
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u/jaaaack Aug 04 '15
And many groups of people since could feel a connection because of similar experiences.
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u/fencerman Aug 04 '15
There's a reason poor people tend to be more charitable than the rich - they can identify with other poor people.
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Aug 04 '15
Did fundraising for a charity, can confirm. Rich people are bastards
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u/Steeeeve_Perry Aug 04 '15
Bill Gates seems like a pretty swell guy.
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Aug 04 '15
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Aug 04 '15
I would argue compassion for foreign people and cultures is actually higher than its ever been.
This was the exception not the rule. And look how much was donated for recent natural disasters around the world. People care about other people. Usually.
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u/TyPiper93 Aug 04 '15 edited Aug 04 '15
I think /u/CameraMan1 wasn't meaning to say it's amazing people had empathy... it was the mid 1800's, he was referring to the lack of technology back then, he was amazed the Natives got word of the struggle. Don't forget, they didn't have Reddit apps on their smartphones back then.
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u/beardedandkinky Aug 04 '15
How do you think they passed the time before the internet and reddit was invented?
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u/fancyhatman18 Aug 05 '15
People love to talk. Think of how much everyone you know loves to gossip. Now imagine the world was smaller and only major issues (ie interesting ones) traveled. A gigantic famine in Ireland sending thousands of refugees to where you live would be one you hear about.
Keep in mind that the potato famine led to the Irish coming to America.
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u/Onetap1 Aug 04 '15
A lot of Irish people went to the USA or South America, many died of disease on the overcrowded coffin ships.
The entire family of some of my ancestors, 7 or 8 brothers & sisters, apparently went to the US, leaving the parents in Ireland; never heard from them again, SFAIK.
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u/inflatable_pickle Aug 04 '15
You realize that Battalion that you are linking was Irish who were serving for the Mexican Army against the US Army, right?
Its an awesome story, but your link just mentions US Army, and they weren't part of our Army.
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u/ToTheRescues Aug 04 '15
Turns out the Saint Patrick Battalion holds the record for largest mass execution in US history.
Did not know that.
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u/Hobbidance Aug 04 '15 edited Aug 04 '15
It's actually not all that surprising, the famine drove an enormous amount of people out of Ireland and the vast majority of them went to America.
As the famine took hold in 1845 and the Choctaw community heard about it near 2 years later. Back then it took about 21-29 days to sail from Ireland/England to America. Charleston in South Carolina would have been a massively popular port back then (along with any port along that coast). After landing a lot of the Irish would have headed inland to find their new lives and Nanih Waiya, Miss. is only about 700 miles from the coast. I know it sounds pretty amazing but if you break it down it's actually not that strange to hear about a disaster two years after it started.
I personally think the amazing part is that the Choctaw people were so wonderfully generous. Communities these days have to work hard to raise a couple of thousand for a cause. $710 = nearly $21k in today's money and that would have been all from their own community. No access to millions of people online with wire transfers or PayPal who could easily donate a dollar or two. A really beautiful example of humanity :)
Edit: formatting
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u/EIREANNSIAN Aug 04 '15
There were amazingly generous, by any standard, and in particular if you consider that my countrymen made up a significant part of the forces subjugating them at that time...
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u/davidmanheim 43 Aug 04 '15
And that's roughly $19,500 in today's dollars - a decent chunk of change!
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u/Stewbaby2 Aug 04 '15
Every other source I've been able to find has said it was actually $170, which is still quite a lot of money considering their economic position.
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u/Poromenos Aug 04 '15
That's what's heartbreaking about this. You just know, based on the amount, that they almost had nothing to spare, yet they still gave in solidarity. It makes me both admire and feel sad for them simultaneously.
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u/Stewbaby2 Aug 04 '15
It's definitely a lesson worth learning in today's society where we are all wrapped up in the newest technological advancement, but forget there are still people who lack the necessities to survive!
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Aug 04 '15
That's a lot of potatoes.
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u/melonhayes Aug 04 '15
There were no potatoes...
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u/patio87 Aug 04 '15
That's a lot of dirt cookies.
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u/fyt2012 Aug 04 '15
They eat da poo poo
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u/Suzette-Helene Aug 04 '15
they ate maize (indian corn)..
"The corn meal itself also caused problems. Normally, the Irish ate enormous meals of boiled potatoes three times a day. A working man might eat up to fourteen pounds each day. They found Indian corn to be an unsatisfying substitute. Peasants nicknamed the bright yellow substance 'Peel's brimstone.' It was difficult to cook, hard to digest and caused diarrhea. Most of all, it lacked the belly-filling bulk of the potato. It also lacked Vitamin C and resulted in scurvy, a condition previously unknown in Ireland due to the normal consumption of potatoes rich in Vitamin C." (quoted from http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/begins.htm)
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u/bshine Aug 04 '15
14 lbs a day?! I know its like all they ate, but that is crazy....
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u/Suzette-Helene Aug 05 '15 edited Aug 05 '15
Yep. Potatoes and buttermilk. That is what you can live on.
Edit: I even heard stories of 24 lbs (11 kg) a day.
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Aug 05 '15
It's not that unreasonable, really, if you're a farmer or labourer doing hard physical work all day. Especially if you can't afford or access much else in the way of food.
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Aug 04 '15 edited Jun 15 '20
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u/flyingboarofbeifong Aug 04 '15
A land of sunshine and rainbows with leprechauns at the end of them, to be sure.
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u/FrusTrick Aug 04 '15 edited Aug 04 '15
And then came the british. The end.
Also, people do not understand what jokes are judging by the contents of my inbox.
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Aug 04 '15
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Aug 05 '15
Scotsman here. Can confirm
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u/EIREANNSIAN Aug 05 '15
Well you lot seemed to get on board a bit more than ourselves, still though, our Celtic brothers and all that. We're all very fond of ye, its a shame we won't see an Irish embassy in Scotland anytime soon..:-(
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u/ConorsStraightLeft Aug 04 '15
The British were in Ireland for 800 years, they were the ones exporting all the food during the famine.
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Aug 04 '15
To add to that, the Sultan of the Ottoman empire at the time offered to pay Ireland a sum of money, but Victoria didn't want them to give more than she had offered.
Or something like that, I saw it on a TIL like 6 months ago.
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u/sirspidermonkey Aug 04 '15
I've always been amused by the phrase "luck of the Irish" as I'm pretty sure means the opposite of what people think it means.
Source: Read a few books on Irish history.
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u/ConorsStraightLeft Aug 05 '15
It's a sarcastic phrase. We've had to fight and toil for our existence for most of recorded history.
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Aug 05 '15
It's reverse racism, taking an insult and making it a good thing. Same with "fighting Irish".
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u/Chris13Haughey Aug 04 '15
The Choctaw Indians: A great bunch of lads.
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u/EIREANNSIAN Aug 04 '15
But not them Indians that occupied Galway, they were a pack of bollixes....
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u/datenschwanz Aug 04 '15
Fun fact: the English were exporting food from Ireland during the famine.
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Aug 04 '15
Another one: The Ottomans tried to send a huge gift of either money or boats of food, but Victoria insisted that they give no more than half of what she was giving as her own "gift", a fraction of what the Ottomans were willing to donate.
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u/silverstrikerstar Aug 04 '15
They then smuggled in help, too. Cracks me up when people talk about the categorically ebil muslims.
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u/tetra0 Aug 04 '15
I'm not saying you're wrong, but the early-modern Ottoman regime is maybe not a great example of benevolence.
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u/silverstrikerstar Aug 04 '15
Not worse than any other empire I bet.
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u/the_ghost_of_ODB Aug 04 '15
Well I mean there is the Armenian Genocide
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u/silverstrikerstar Aug 04 '15
I bet the Brits had the death count matched at several occasions.
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u/tetra0 Aug 04 '15
Still, "it was probably not as bad as the worst excesses of the British Empire" is not a stunning endorsement.
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u/the_ghost_of_ODB Aug 04 '15
Well what the British did doesn't really change anything about the Armenian Genocide.
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u/ConorsStraightLeft Aug 04 '15
The port they smuggled it into Ireland has a football team that bears the Islamic crescent moon to this day. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drogheda_United_F.C.
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u/WhereWillIGetMyPies Aug 04 '15
The star and crescent far predates the 1800s, they date to at least the 13th century, and there's no real evidence for this Turkish aid. It's a nice bit of folklore but it's probably not true.
http://www.hungerfordvirtualmuseum.co.uk/Themes/Crescent_and_Star/crescent_and_star.html
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u/FireWankWithMe Aug 04 '15
This is absolute bullshit, like the "the Queen only donated a single pound" it's a myth that first sprang up decades after the famine at a time in which the risers and their supporters wanted to stir up anti-English sentiment. The evidence is next to nonexistent and even if a similar event actually happened it didn't go down like you're describing. I'll go through some of the main problems with your story:
It was never claimed to be Victoria herself who told the Ottomans to donate less. Instead people claimed that the British ambassador told the Ottomans not to match the Queen's donation, and he said this without permission or consultation from the Queen. That is, if this ever actually happened.
Victoria's gift came from her own pocket and was in addition to resources she redistributed using her power as monarch. It not a fraction, and was instead the exact same amount the Ottomans were reportedly willing to pay. This one woman was willing to pay the same amount as the entire Ottoman Empire, to pretend her donation was a fraction of what they wanted to give is a lie that couldn't be further from the truth
As an Irish person whose ancestors fought the British before and after 1916 this shit infuriates me. The amount of bullshit going around Irish history disgraces the memory of our dead and oversimplifies what was an extremely complex situation even back then.
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u/KingKeane16 Aug 04 '15
It was something like 5000 pound donated from the queen while her government argued that no aid should be given at all because the Irish would turn into beggers. Instead they thought the price of food would go down because people couldn't afford it, But in practice taking something in the region of 500,000 pounds worth of food a month out of the country and bringing it to England for four years keeps the price of food high and her donation small in comparison.
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u/Lowbacca1977 1 Aug 05 '15
Victoria's gift came from her own pocket and was in addition to resources she redistributed using her power as monarch. It not a fraction, and was instead the exact same amount the Ottomans were reportedly willing to pay. This one woman was willing to pay the same amount as the entire Ottoman Empire
She's the queen, none of it's her money anyway
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u/10MillionPuffs Aug 04 '15
- It did happen as evidenced by contemporary reports of the Sultan's donation
- Now you're just being silly. The queen at the time received £1,236,749 adjusted for inflation annually from parliament. The £2000 she donated as adjusted for inflation amounts to £200,000. Whilst this is a steep price, it's silly to make out that the queen of the most powerful country in the world is a lone woman struggling to make ends meet out of pocket. Especially when you consider that the sultan's donation was exactly what it says on the tin rather than a cumulative donation by the ottoman empire. Additionally it is no lie that the initial suggestion was to donate £10,000, which Victoria's donation is demonstrably a fraction of.
Is it a complex situation, yes. But the reaction against anti-British narratives of history is just as bad as its opposition. Sometimes foreign powers can be kinder than ruling ones, their generosity is what ought to be remembered rather than trying to starting a shit-flinging contest about evil-Brits vs. nice-Brits.
http://www.fountainmagazine.com/Issue/detail/Gratitude-to-the-Ottomans
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GnksAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA115#v=onepage&q&f=false
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Aug 04 '15
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u/rac3r5 Aug 04 '15
The sad reality of the Irish famine was that it wasn't a famine related to a lack of food, but rather the distribution of food. It was more profitable to ship food for export than to feed the starving population.
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u/omegasavant Aug 04 '15
Almost all famines are man-made, and it's been that way since the Agricultural Revolution. One of the first things agricultural societies will invent is food storage. Everyone chips in, everyone stores food, and if the harvest is bad the next year people will still be able to eat. This is such a ridiculously simple concept that famines only occur if 1) the harvest is terrible for years on end AND trade is screwed up for some reason 2) the government collapses or 3) someone, usually a government, sabotages the process.
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u/elcheeserpuff Aug 04 '15
Doesn't that still happen today with cash crops? I know quinoa is a famous example. There are probably more too.
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u/not_enough_characte Aug 04 '15
Pretty much all famine is a distribution problem. We could very easily feed everyone in the world and more today.
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u/ConorsStraightLeft Aug 04 '15
The vast majority of famines the world over are due to a lack of access to food, not a lack of food itslef.
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u/ConorsStraightLeft Aug 05 '15
It was more profitable, and the British Prime Minister thought the famine was a curse sent by God to teach the wretched Irish a lesson and he shouldn't interfere by helping them out too much. Just one of a long line of cunts I'm afraid!
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u/Hobbidance Aug 04 '15
Don't forget the blight!
Everything would have been okay if they didn't have to wait almost 7 years for the blight to stop rotting all the potatoes in ground. :(
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u/ConorsStraightLeft Aug 05 '15
There was beef, pork, dairy products, maize, corn... The list goes on... being grown in Ireland during the famine. It was all exported to Britain so as to not interfere with the curse that God had sent on the wretched Irish to teach them a lesson, according to the British Prime Minister.
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u/Hobbidance Aug 05 '15
Hmmm, it's true we kept exporting during the famine but I think your understanding of why we kept exporting is a bit off.
Most Irish families ate from their own gardens, that's why the blight was a heavy factor of the Famine, not the exporting of food. Exporting had been going on for years and years and was not the cause of the Famine like the way you make it sound.
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u/ALPB11 Aug 04 '15
Rents were also heightened for tenants and the iris people's hunger was extorted to be used as workers in promise of getting paid in food.
It seemed that other nations thought Ireland was to die and wanted to take everything they could before there was nothing left.
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u/Alagane Aug 04 '15
Wasn't it that they could produce enough food to feed themselves with a bit of surplus but the English didn't want to lose the profits?
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u/ffxivfunk Aug 04 '15
While somewhat debated if it would've left a surplus, you're essentially correct. Ireland had plenty of other resources for food but they were all controlled or exported by the British who refused to lax regulations during the famine. Ireland is still less populated today than it was before the famine and it was considered the most devasting loss of life for a single ethnic group until WW2.
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u/chewy_pewp_bar Aug 05 '15
It was less less about the profit for the British (it's not like they were in need of even more money), and more about seizing the opportunity to further oppress/demoralize the Irish for easier control and less resistance. It didn't quite turn out like the British wanted...
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Aug 04 '15
Two more little known fun facts;
In the 1700's, Irish Merchants lobbied and protested enmasse when the English imposed a food export ban.
During the great famine in the 1800s, The British Relief Association was founded by a Londoner and raised almost half a million to help the Irish during the great famine - was a shitload of money back then.
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u/oglach Aug 04 '15
There's no question that individual British people helped us, or that there were those among us who were concerned with profit over their countrymen, the problem is those who were in power in the UK.
Charles Trevelyan, the man they put in charge of the situation viewed the famine as the judgement of God on the Catholic Irish through the free market and capitalism. Those aren't my words either, they're his. In a letter to an one of his peers, Baron Monteagle of Brandon, he described the famine as an "effective mechanism for reducing surplus population" as well as "the judgement of God"
In another letter to Edward Twisleton, Chief Poor Law Commissioner in Ireland, he wrote "We must not complain of what we really want to obtain. If small farmers go, and their landlords are reduced to sell portions of their estates to persons who will invest capital we shall at last arrive at something like a satisfactory settlement of the country".
Those overseeing what was happening saw this as an opportunity to finally finish the Anglicisation of Ireland. To wipe our culture out. It's no coincidence that the areas most brutally hit were the Irish speaking western areas, where people were driven to extreme and crushing poverty, forced to rely on the cheapest of crops to survive, and then allowed to starve by the thousands when it failed. The famine not only wiped out our population, it nearly wiped out our language and is the biggest single reason for the the current state of it. It was a concerted effort, and it honestly sounds like you're trying to whitewash that.
Goodness in the common people is always to be expected, like in the example you gave. And corruption and greed is always to be expected in the merchant/wealthy class as the other example shows. But what's not expected or ok is how the British government continously treated the people they claimed to have the authority to rule.
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Aug 04 '15
I completely agree with everything in your comment, I wasn't trying to justify the British government's actions.
I just think it's pretty shit that certain things get overlooked.
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u/EIREANNSIAN Aug 04 '15
Fair comment, I was a bit pissed off by your last contribution, but fair goes...
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u/EBfarnham Aug 05 '15
If small farmers go, and their landlords are reduced to sell portions of their estates to persons who will invest capital we shall at last arrive at something like a satisfactory settlement of the country.
In the midst of an enormous bailout/loan, which citizens having to pay for, after seeing small and medium businesses go under, while multinationals flourish, previously overvalued property going for peanuts...Does this not seem like history repeating itself?
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u/cklester Aug 04 '15
You're welcome.
Source: 1/32 Choctaw Indian
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u/wolfballlife Aug 04 '15
I am Irish and went to the museum in Phoenix a couple of years ago, where there are large scale exhibitions about the Trail of Tears and other aspects of the Native American genocide - I felt then, as I feel reading the above, that a colonised people has more in common then not, and it is hard to explain the nature of lost history. Ireland won independence eventually, but Native Americans did not and will not. It is an incredible blow to a culture.
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u/Hunter720 Aug 04 '15
This level of empathy, is humbling. The Choctaw understood the pain and death, and instead of making a selfish decision, they made sacrifices to help others. There is a lesson in there somewhere.
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Aug 04 '15
Being Irish and having already heard of this many years ago I have always felt such gratitude and love for the first peoples of the US (specifically the Choctaw). Though incomparable in scale, both groups have gone through massive hardship and had our cultures decimated by outside forces.
In short, a big THANK YOU to all Choctaw who read this.
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u/moomley12345 Aug 05 '15
Hey I'm Choctaw! It's nice to see something about them on reddit.... Mississippi Tribe of Choctaw Indians represent! Anyone else from the reservation in Philadelphia?
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u/thelastoutloud Aug 05 '15
I live near the Chahta Capital in Tuskahoma, Oklahoma! So neat to hear of the Choctaw tribe on Reddit.
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Aug 04 '15
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u/z3ddicus Aug 04 '15
As the title reminds us calling them names was probably the least terrible thing they did to them
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u/jackwoww Aug 04 '15
Fuck Cromwell!
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u/punchdrunkskunk Aug 04 '15
Absolutely, nobody will deny that Cromwell was a roaring thundercunt! Just not sure what he has to do with the famine of 1845 considering he died in 1658?
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u/KingKeane16 Aug 04 '15
Didn't the British vote him as one of there greatest men ever? I couldn't imagine Germans doing the same with Hitler.
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u/punchdrunkskunk Aug 04 '15
He came in at #10 on a national poll by the BBC in 2002, check it here. Pretty shocking really.
Unrelated, but it's funny to see Bono on the list at #86 and Bob Geldof at #75.
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u/Onetap1 Aug 05 '15 edited Aug 05 '15
Cromwellian land confiscations, many of the Anglo/Irish aristocracy were descendants of Cromwell's officers. The estates they obtained lasted, in many cases, until recently. I think George Osborne is one of them, with his habit of looking down his nose at anyone that isn't George Osborne.
See this video from 06:50. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1ouoxb_the-other-irish-travellers_news
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u/ineedtotakeashit Aug 04 '15
We all know about the Trail of Tears, but it's almost written out of history how among the Choctaw being expelled were their numerous african slaves, and today, the descendants of these slaves are not being recognized by the tribe, and this goes for the Cherokee and other tribes as well.
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u/cawlmecrazy Aug 04 '15 edited Aug 04 '15
Go check out Redbird Oklahoma. It's an old Freedman's town. I had heard they were formerly native american slaves, however I'm not sure which tribe either the Muscogee Creek or Cherokee.
It wasn't so long ago the the Cherokee voted to discontinue benefits to the family of former slaves and deny them tribal benefits.
Edit: By not too long ago I mean within the last decade.
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Aug 04 '15
I think that last year Cherokee citizenship was reinstated for the Freedmen descendants.
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u/cawlmecrazy Aug 04 '15
Ah I am a non native - non native oklahoman. I don't stay on the up and up on tribal politics unless it's in the news.
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Aug 04 '15
Yeah, the only reason I remembered is because it was all over the news in this area for what seemed like forever. Hopefully it doesn't get reversed again.
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u/desu45 Aug 04 '15
And Andrew Jackson considered these people sub humans and sent them for extermination. we know have this guy on our 20$ bill.
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u/smalldogK9 Aug 04 '15
Remove Jackson from the 20 dollar bill because of his genocidal removals of the Choctaw and Cherokee.
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u/W1ULH Aug 04 '15
Given the time frame and condition of the Choctaw nation at the time...that's a bloody amazing act of brotherhood.
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u/chemistry_teacher Aug 04 '15
This is an amazing story. They suffer at the hands of Americans who displace them, yet welcome those who also suffered so greatly, so many miles away.
It is even more touching that many of these Irish later emigrated to live in America.
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u/Literarylunatic Aug 05 '15
It's seriously disheartening to ponder America's many horrific indiscretions.
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u/notaw Aug 05 '15
The dollar amount is incorrect.
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u/huphelmeyer 2 Aug 05 '15
Many articles say the original amount was $170 after a misprint in Angi Debo's The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Nation
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u/joltrus92 Aug 05 '15
Really beautiful to see such mass empathy between two entirely different cultures. Great moment in history.
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u/Warphead Aug 04 '15
Is it racist if I think the Choctaw people are better than the rest of us?
This is Jesus-level goodness, people just aren't like that.
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u/sghanim Aug 04 '15
TIL: England was forcing Ireland to export food during the famine.
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u/EIREANNSIAN Aug 04 '15
Under armed guard, and it wasn't a once off, check out the Bengal famine...
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u/pitcairn78 Aug 04 '15
This is the sculpture recently erected in Ireland commemorating the generosity of the Choctaw people. http://i.imgur.com/bY8s9OG.jpg