Choctaw Indians helped us, we should help them

December 29, 2014, marked the 124th anniversary of the Massacre at Wounded Knee (South Dakota), where 153 members of a band of 350 Minneconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota (120 men, 230 women and children), unarmed and in the act of surrender, were slaughtered by members of four divisions of the US Army’s Seventh Cavalry. 

As most of those injured died in the days that followed, almost 300 were killed, and buried in a mass grave.

Subsequently, the Congressional Medal of Honour was awarded to 18 of the perpetrators. There is an active campaign by and on behalf of members of the Lakota nation, led by Calvin Spotted Elk to have the medals rescinded.

It is also of some interest that during the Famine, the Choctaw Indians collected money and sent it to the starving Irish. It is generally interpreted that this act of generosity from strangers across the Atlantic was prompted by the Choctaw experience of the ‘Trail of Tears’ in 1831, when almost half of their people had died of starvation during their forced relocation.

Late in her presidency, President Mary McAleese visited and met with members of the Choctaw Nation, to thank them on behalf of the Irish people for their gift.

I believe that this piece of Irish history should be remembered, and that supporting Calvin Spotted Elk’s campaign should be seen as a welcome and reciprocal opportunity to stand in solidarity with the American Indian. His online petition is available at: tinyurl.com/o5tfsdk

Stephen Minton

School of Education

Trinity College Dublin