History shows that those tribes who trudged the Trail of Tears, nonetheless gave their widow's mite to the Irish during the Potato Famine.

"The people gathered at Fort Gibson in the Western Cherokee Nation in March of 1847 were a diverse group. Cherokees, U.S. soldiers, local missionaries and traders passing through Indian Territory pressed together, eager to hear the speakers. Lieutenant Colonel Gustavus Loomis, Fort Gibson’s second in command, quieted the crowd. He introduced a “gentleman,” who had been invited to “read some newspaper accounts of the famine” that was then decimating Ireland. After “a few selections” had been read, Loomis asked the crowd to contribute. He later reported that they had raised over one hundred dollars. Ten days later, and less than twenty miles away, a similar meeting took place in the Choctaw Nation. There, Major William Armstrong read a report prepared by the “Memphis Committee” for Irish famine relief. In response, “all” who attended the meeting – a “considerable portion” of whom were Choctaws – gave.

"For those of us who study philanthropy today, these instances of Cherokee and Choctaw participation in overseas charity are remarkable. Native peoples in the 1840s generally – and these native peoples in particular – do not match the “nineteenth-century philanthropist” conjured in popular imagination. In large part, this is because much of the work on nineteenth-century philanthropy has tended to see charity’s primary utility as a bourgeoisie tool for social control – and basically as a carrot that rich, middle class and mostly white donors used to shape the poor, “pagan,” and “uncivilized” into their image of respectability."--Anelise Shrout, HistPhil