Kindred Spirits: Shilombish Ittibachvffa

By Leslie Stall Widener, illustrated by Johnson Yazzie. Charlesbridge, 2024. 32 pages. $17.99/hardcover; $9.99/eBook. Recommended for ages 5–8.

This book tells of a connection that I suspect many people do not know about; it was certainly new to me. In 1847, still recovering from their own ordeal on the Trail of Tears, members of the Choctaw Nation heard about the suffering of the Irish people due to the potato famine. They collected $170 in aid to send to people in Ireland. This kindness was remembered in Ireland, where the connection between the nations was renewed in the 1990s, and a commemorative sculpture was commissioned in 2013. Unveiled and dedicated four years later, this sculpture by Irish artist Alex Pentek was named Kindred Spirits. It is featured on the book’s cover. Then in 2020 when the Navajo and Hopi Nations were devastated by COVID-19, Irish people sent substantial aid in memory of the kindness they had received from the Choctaw people 173 years earlier.

This book shares the story of these interconnections episodically with spare poetic prose, richly colored paintings, and sidebars with more detailed history. The author Leslie Stall Widener is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and the illustrator Johnson Yazzie was born on the Navajo Nation in Arizona.

The separate episodes illustrated in the book are not entirely in chronological order, so the timeline at the end of the book helps clarify the sequence of events. There is also a helpful pronunciation key for the handful of Choctaw and Irish words included in the story. The historical background, of course, includes much cruelty and suffering, which the book does not shy from. The publisher recommends this book for ages 5–8, but for the younger children, it might be appropriate to leave out the more detailed history and share only the episodes told in story form as well as the glowing, evocative illustrations. Older children in this age range and older will likely find this book worth reading, as will adults. Certainly I appreciated hearing about it!

The pay-it-forward message in Kindred Spirits is one that could easily find a place in First-day school lessons about social justice and community. (There is even a Quaker connection in the story, found in the notes at the back: it was a Friends organization that collected and sent the funds that the Choctaw Nation donated to the Irish.) It’s always good for us to tell each other of how—even in difficult times—people can reach out across differences to show love and empathy for one another. We need these stories to counteract the messages of fear and division, and to remind us that every act of love sends ripples far into the future, beyond any immediate results we might see.

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Anne Nydam is a member of Wellesley (Mass.) Meeting and is currently serving as clerk. A former middle-school art teacher, she now works as an author and artist.