I Felt the Kinship Before I Knew the History

I have been Irish for as long as I can remember.

On every side of my family tree there are Irish roots, and the surname Murphy rather gives the game away.

More specifically, my dad’s family came from Munster.

Then I did an Ancestry DNA test and got a surprise. My mum’s side pointed back to Connacht, right next door, with County Cork appearing strongly in the story too.

I remember looking at the map and wondering something I’ll never be able to answer: if our families had never left Ireland, would my mum and dad somehow have found each other there anyway?

Maybe. I liked the thought.

There’s Scottish ancestry in me too, which feels particularly appropriate considering I now live in Scotland. I can almost hear my Scottish ancestors taking the piss out of the Irish ones while I write this.

Ireland, though, is somewhere I still haven’t been.

I want to go badly, but not yet. My dog Bobo is an old man now, and I’m not leaving him to go on holidays while I still have him. There will be other years for travelling. There won’t be many more years with him.

When I do eventually go, I want to take some of my dad’s ashes with me.

I don’t mean that in a sad or morbid way. Dad travelled a lot when he was alive. We were lucky enough to see much of the Mediterranean area as a family, and he got to visit many of the places he wanted to see.

Since he died, I’ve had this idea that whenever I eventually go somewhere new, I’d like to take a little piece of him with me.

Ireland feels different, though.

That would feel less like taking him somewhere new and more like taking him home.

And then, in a completely different part of my life, Yellowstone happened.

If you’ve watched my videos, you’ll know I’m incapable of getting through very long ones without mentioning Yellowstone, Taylor Sheridan or one of the related shows.

I’m not remotely American, Western or cowboy adjacent. The closest I can offer is that I once sang country music professionally, which I think should give me half a point.

But from the first time I watched those Yellowstone stories, I found myself drawn to the Indigenous characters and perspectives.

If an episode barely touched that side of the story, something felt missing.

Watching 1883, I loved Elsa Dutton’s openness towards the people she met, and that part of her story stayed with me.

I’m aware of how strange this sounds. I’m also aware that feeling drawn to another people’s history does not make that history mine.

Native American nations are not one single culture, and I would never pretend to understand experiences that aren’t mine.

But there was a pull there that I couldn’t explain.

Eventually curiosity got the better of me, and I Googled something along the lines of:

“Is there some kind of connection between Native American culture and the Irish?”

And there it was.

In 1847, during the Great Irish Famine, members of the Choctaw Nation raised $170 to help people starving in Ireland.

What makes the gift so extraordinary is what the Choctaw people themselves had endured. Only around sixteen years earlier, they had been forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the south-eastern United States and sent west along the Trail of Tears.

Despite suffering displacement, hunger, disease and death themselves, they still chose to give to people thousands of miles away.

Today, one of the most beautiful symbols of that friendship stands in Midleton, County Cork.

It is called Kindred Spirits.

Created by Alex Pentek, the sculpture consists of nine enormous stainless-steel feathers arranged like an empty bowl.

It commemorates the Choctaw gift and the friendship that grew from it and was officially dedicated in 2017.

County Cork.

Munster.

The place my own family history keeps pointing me back towards.

I will never know whether the Choctaw donation directly helped one of my ancestors, and I don’t want to turn a possibility into a fact just because it makes a good story.

But my family were part of an Ireland being devastated by famine and mass emigration, and people who had survived terrible displacement themselves looked across an ocean at strangers and decided that their suffering mattered.

Maybe what I felt watching those stories was coincidence.

Maybe humans simply recognise something in stories of survival, belonging and losing home. Maybe I had heard about the Choctaw-Irish connection years ago and forgotten it consciously while some small part of my brain kept hold of it.

Or maybe there are things we feel before we understand them.

I’m a Christian, so I’m not about to announce that I’ve solved reincarnation or discovered a past life because I watched Yellowstone. But I’m curious enough about life, faith and the things we still don’t understand to leave a little room for mystery.

Whatever the explanation, learning this history made that inexplicable feeling of kinship mean something different to me.

And it made me even more determined to get to Ireland one day.

I want to stand in front of Kindred Spirits in County Cork.

I want to see Munster and Connacht with my own eyes.

I want to take my dad with me, in the only way I can now, and say:

We made it back.

Most of all, I want to say thank you.

Because nearly two centuries ago, people who had already lost so much chose generosity over turning inward.

The bond has lasted ever since, with official visits, scholarships and acts of reciprocity continuing between Ireland and the Choctaw Nation.

If, like me, your family roots run through Ireland, I think that history is worth knowing.

Because somebody, somewhere, who had every reason to say, “We have suffered enough ourselves,” chose instead to say:

“We know what suffering feels like. Let us help.”

Across an ocean, across cultures and across almost two centuries, that is a kind of kinship worth remembering.