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In what could be one of the ultimate cases of paying it forward, an online fundraising campaign to provide relief for Navajo and Hopi families affected by the COVID-19 pandemic is benefiting from the actions of another U.S. tribe from more than 170 years ago.
In 1847, as the Choctaw Nation reeled from a forced move to Oklahoma a decade earlier, tribal members rallied to raise the modern-day equivalent of more than $5,000 for people they'd never met halfway around the world in Ireland, a country suffering amid the 19th-century potato famine.
The Irish never forgot, as Choctaw Nation citizen Katosha Nakai said. When they heard news of how the two Northern Arizona tribes were struggling with health and economic woes amid the pandemic, they recalled the lesson learned all those years ago.
Irish citizens and descendants of some of the people aided in the potato famine are returning the Choctaw's help in their own way, sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to others in need in Indian Country.
“What the Choctaws did back then was a lesson,” said Nakai. “And we understand suffering because of our experiences along the Trail of Tears and Blood. Our people had to literally use hatchets to cut through the forests. There was a lot of pain and death.”
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