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300 Years Ago, There Was a Brutal Murder. We Could Learn From the Treaty That Followed

November 30, 2022 | By Nicole Eustace | nytimes.com

A moose-antler comb believed to have been created by a Susquehannock or Seneca artist in the late 17th or early 18th century may be emblematic of a Haudenosaunee commitment to achieving diplomatic accord with settler colonists.

A moose-antler comb believed to have been created by a Susquehannock or Seneca artist in the late 17th or early 18th century may be emblematic of a Haudenosaunee commitment to achieving diplomatic accord with settler colonists

Dr. Eustace is a professor of history at New York University. Her book “Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America” received a Pulitzer Prize in history this year and was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2021.

Three hundred years ago, leaders of three British colonies and representatives of the Indigenous nations known as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy gathered in Albany, N.Y., to sign what is the oldest continuously recognized treaty in colonial American and United States law. They sought to resolve a crisis that colonists believed could convulse the continent like no other: the brutal murder of a Seneca hunter named Sawantaeny by a pair of white fur traders, the brothers John and Edmund Cartlidge.

Colonists feared that violence would spark a war with the confederacy and threaten the British Empire in North America. But the gathered Haudenosaunees had set their minds on peace, not war. The treaty the two sides negotiated and signed that September contained a Haudenosaunee vision of reparative justice that set aside every anxious expectation of the colonists. Yet its contents came to be buried by the passage of time as surely as Sawantaeny’s body was covered with earth.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/opinion/native-american-treaty-justice.html