Covered with Night by Nicole Eustace
Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America, a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for nonfiction, was published in that year by Liveright/W.W. Norton & Company. Dr. Nicole Eustace is Professor of History at New York University where she is the director of the NYU Atlantic History Workshop and specializes in early modern Atlantic and early United States history. She has also authored 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism and Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution.
Unlike some nonfiction, the text format is in the present tense describing events as if they were occurring in-the-moment. Aptly footnoted throughout, “it contains endnotes which provide additional information and context, a formal bibliography, acknowledgments, and index. The bibliography demonstrates that there are still many extant primary source documents of the colonial period, in addition to secondary ones, which enable historians to weave a story as told here. Interspersed throughout the text are illustrations of documents, personal portraits, and drawings of homes, structures, and the contemporary layout of the city of Philadelphia. There is also one map of eastern Pennsylvania in the front of the book that shows the many, largely Native American, trails and ‘roads’ which wound their way west to the Susquehanna River in addition to the various relevant points referenced in the text.” [Thomas McClung New York Journal of Books Review]
What makes this book a must read, is its exploration of the contrast between the white colonists’ view of justice and that of the Indigenous people. In 1722, these two vastly different notions of justice collide when on the eve of a major treaty conference between Iroquois leaders and European colonists, two white fur traders attack an Indigenous hunter and trader and leave him for dead in his cabin near Conestoga Pennsylvania. It is important to keep in mind that at this time, the Iroquois Confederacy was extremely powerful in North America and the European colonists needed their friendship and protection. This murder set everyone along the mid-Atlantic on edge and led to debates in which the Iroquois (or the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, as they are known today) tried to explain their view of justice to the colonists. They wanted representatives of the colonists to accept responsibility for the crime and apologize. But rather than hold the accused murderers in jail and put them on trial where if found guilty, they would be subjected to capital punishment, they asked that the representatives engage in their rituals of reconciliation that included providing emotional offerings in spiritual ceremonies and making economic reparations. After a series of shared condolence ceremonies and reparations, the Haudenosaunee stated that they would welcome the traders back to Conestoga as members of the community. Ultimately, representatives for the colonists agreed to take part in the requested process that included acknowledgement of the crime, restitution, and reconciliation. Future actions were delineated in The Albany Treaty of 1722 where long-held Indigenous peoples’ values were acknowledged. In an interview on Center for Brooklyn History Talk, the author explains the importance of the treaty signed in Albany, New York, the oldest recognized treaty in the history of Anglo-American law.
When you think of founding documents of the United States, you probably don’t think of The Albany Treaty of 1722 (The Great Treaty of Peace) and yet this is part of our heritage and part of our history and the statements in it about the equal value of life, the idea that a person’s human worth is not erased by one moment of violence is incredibly important. It’s not about letting someone off scot-free. There has to be acknowledgement. There has to be a long ritual process of rebuilding community, of reweaving ties; but the idea that all people have human worth is a profound value of Native peoples that found its way into the Great Treaty of Peace that was based on condolences and provides an alternative heritage that we may want to turn to as we move our way forward.
