The international story of empathy you’ve probably never heard

There is something hauntingly beautiful about “Kindred Spirits” by Alex Pentek. The sculpture consists of nine 20-foot (6.1 m) stainless steel eagle feathers arranged in the shape of a bowl, with no two feathers being identical. It was built in 2015 in the Irish town of Midleton, Co Cork.

The sculpture is to commemorate the donation by the Choctaw Nation — then of Oklahoma but originally of mainly Mississippi — of $170 to Irish Famine relief in 1847. The Choctaw, themselves the victim of forced emigration from their ancestral lands in the US southeast in the 1830s (during which thousands died), saw in the plight of starving Irish people, something in themselves. As was noted:

It was also noted:

1847 is referred to in Ireland as ‘Black 47’, the height of the famine in Ireland and the same year the Choctaw donated. It is difficult to imagine now but just 169 years ago, millions of people were starving, dying or fleeing Ireland as refugees. At the start of…