In the end, he found answers, but not on the reservations or anywhere he might have expected. He found them in Ireland.
He found them in the parallel tales of history — of colonization and dispossession and poverty. And in the Irish love of the land and celebration of ancient places — like the Hill of Tara, ancient mythological seat of the High Kings, and Newgrange, a 5,000-year-old passage tomb carved with Celtic symbols that resembled some Choctaw signs.
Even in the way the Irish struggled to preserve their native language, teaching it in schools, using it on road signs and documents.
What if, he wondered, the Choctaw had managed to do the same?
White Deer, 59, knew little about Ireland until the early 1990s, other than “they threw a big party for St. Patrick every year.’’ And then he met a group of Irish hikers at a tribal resort in Mississippi. He was working on an art commission. They had come to walk the historic “Trail of Tears,’’ to worship at Nanih Waiya, and to offer a donation of $20,000 to the Choctaw nation.
He was stunned. His own people commemorated the trail, but not like this, not with this determination to learn from the past and act on it.
The connection, he would learn, dated to a nearly forgotten tale that unfolded in 1847.
“Black ’47,’’ the Irish named it, one of the worst years of the Potato Famine. More than a million people died of disease and starvation during The Great Hunger and another million fled on “coffin ships’’ to America.
A world away, another sorrowing people heard their cries. Under Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy, the Choctaw had been displaced from their homeland in Mississippi just a decade earlier and forced to march 600 miles to Oklahoma, thousands dying along the way. With memories of the Trail of Tears still fresh, they collected $170 — today’s equivalent of about $8,000 — and sent it to the starving people across the sea.
