Recipes for Resilience

How might seasonal stories help us remember the intertwined histories of Indigenous and Irish food cultures? In this piece, I will explore the longstanding relationship between the Choctaw Nation and Ireland, delving into the history of the gift of $172 made by Choctaw tribal members to victims of the Irish famine in 1847. This moment of striking generosity in the wake of catastrophe is a pivotal moment in a transatlantic relationship of giving that is still remembered and acted upon between the Irish and Choctaw citizens today. Using this historic episode as a starting point, this article will consider how experiences of food insecurity have shaped culinary production cultures across local and global Irish and Choctaw contexts. I ask how this distinct and understudied history might inform wider understandings and practices of giving between settlers, Europeans, and Indigenous peoples today.

In late March 1847, members of the Choctaw Nation decided to do an extraordinary thing. Just over fifteen years after the tribe had been forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the south-eastern region of what is currently known as the United States, and following their subsequent migration to Indian Territory, members elected to take up a collection to send to the starving in Ireland. An Gorta Mór, also called The Great Hunger or Great Irish Famine, lasted from 1845-1852, resulting in the deaths of over a million people, and the emigration of a million more. As a period of Irish history stalked by starvation, disease, and emigration, the Great Hunger recalls parallel histories of the Choctaw, Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes – all of whom were forcibly displaced from their lands in the wake of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Trail of Tears that followed. The Choctaw’s generous decision to send money to the Irish in the aftermath of their own experience of catastrophe marked the beginning of a transatlantic relationship between these two peoples that is still remembered and acted upon today.

The “Choctaw Gift”, as it has come to be known, is a compelling moment that connects otherwise distant peoples. The process of Indian Removal, it should be noted, also paved the way for increased European settlement on dispossessed Indigenous lands in the Lower Mississippi. This knotty historical detail is sometimes omitted from the often-celebrated story of the Gift, as Irish immigrants were amongst those who settled these newly “available” lands . Although the exact amount that the Choctaw donated to the people of Ireland remains a matter of scholarly debate (accounts vary between $710, $170 and $172) the gift was undoubtedly a hugely significant material donation as well as an empathetic gesture of solidarity. Ties between the Choctaw and the Irish have remained strong and political visits, educational programmes, and the establishment of cultural works and sites commemorating this historic relationship have played a role in cementing future bonds between the two communities. Yet the cultural dynamics of how the Gift is memorialised by both nations remain somewhat understudied. Variously interpreted as an exemplary illustration of the Choctaw’s Christian piety that is illustrative of the supposed “successes” of colonial conversion practices, an expression of anti-colonial solidarity that reinforces nationalist narratives, and a defiant assertion of tribal sovereignty in the wake of dispossession, the legacies of the Choctaw Gift continue to make for lively debates. Nevertheless, it is clear that this historic episode can be seen as a pivotal moment in generating a transatlantic relationship based on a philosophy of giving that is still remembered and practiced by Irish and Choctaw citizens in various ways today.

The Choctaw scholar and author LeAnne Howe notes in an essay that the Choctaw collective experience of starvation is immediately recognisable in the tribal name for a specific month of the year. Hohchafo Chito, or “Big Famine”, she continues, ‘identifies a time of year in our traditional Choctaw calendar when our people remembered starvation’. Ancestral memories of food scarcity are remembered in the yearly reiteration of the story of a seasonal ‘hunger time’ – the point in the year when stored and preserved foodstuffs are diminishing and the new harvest cycle has not yet commenced. In the cold, damp climate of Britain and Ireland, the spring to early summer season is known as the “Hungry Gap” for much the same reason. From the dwindling of old crops and the first harvests of the new growing season, this gulf exposed existing inequities in the Irish food system, particularly for the poorer farming classes. Ireland in the pre-Famine period had become heavily dependent on a single crop, the potato. This dependence led to vulnerabilities in the food system as a result of the turn towards monocultural crop cultivation. Moreover, in the years leading up to the Great Hunger, the poorest classes in Ireland had become largely dependent on cheaper varieties of potato, limiting the diversity of crops being grown even more and increasing vulnerabilities to shocks in the system such as disease.  Whilst seasonal insecurities in the food system were collectively known about and prepared for, as the culinary historian Regina Sexton has shown, these conditions affected the duration of the Hungry Gap in Ireland, causing the leaner period of the year to vary by region and duration. These precarious conditions set the stage for the devastation that followed.

Much has been made of how the reliance on potato cultivation contributed to the severity of the Famine. The potato (an indigenous American vegetable) had become a central ingredient in Irish diets by the end of the 17th century. What is less well known is how another native North American crop played its own important role in the story. Both these plants migrated across the Atlantic, and both would also come to shape the culinary memory of the Great Hunger in Ireland in different ways.

At the time of the Famine, Ireland was a colony of England. In the mid-1840s, responding to the crisis, the British government, led by Prime Minister Robert Peel, ordered the importation of maize from America in an attempt to ameliorate starvation. “Yellowmeal”, as it was also known, was initially an unfamiliar and challenging ingredient, largely due to a lack of knowledge as to its preparation. Known as nixtamalization, maize must be cooked, soaked and hulled, a process that was known to Indigenous peoples across the Americas for many of whom maize is an integral and often sacred food source. Without this knowledge, the recipients of Peel’s supposed solution were left largely unable to digest the “yellowmeal”, leading to it gaining the moniker ‘Peel’s Brimstone’. Such short-term thinking belies both the colonial devaluing of Indigenous knowledge and the disregard for the impact of catastrophes like the Great Hunger, the severity of which was also shaped by colonial histories of land division, exploitation, and hierarchy.

The (hi)story of maize in its journey from America to Ireland during the Great Hunger and its relationship to Choctaw and Irish cultures offers lessons to be learned from. By looking to stories of seasonality and sustenance, as well as the example of reciprocity between distant peoples that the history of the Choctaw Gift illustrates, we can reconsider our relationships to peoples, plants, and places as we face the twin crises of climate change and cultural division that shape this political moment. Stories, after all, connect us, and sharing stories with the aim of learning from one another remains a tantalising method for practicing responsible relations both on and beyond Indigenous lands.