ABSTRACT
When Nichau Noite went to trial two months later, he pleaded guilty to the murders, despite being urged not to do so by his interpreter. As a result, the two judges on the bench of the colony’s Court of King’s Bench condemned him to death and sentenced him to hang, that being the only legal method of execution for murder under English criminal law at the time. But Indigenous leaders, including some from Nichau Noite’s own group (who had come to Quebec City as requested) and others from the Six Nations Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), important military allies of the British, pleaded with Haldimand that hanging was dishonourable, asking that he be shot instead. Haldimand consulted his Executive Council, which unanimously recommended that the hanging be replaced by death by ring squad, as being ‘more consonent [sic] to the Ideas of Savages’. Two of the councillors who supported this entirely extra-legal decision (at least in English criminal law) were the very judges who had just sentenced Nichau Noite to hang. Haldimand ordered the change in sentence, and Nichau Noite became the only civilian executed in Quebec under British rule not to be hanged. Many members of Indigenous groups attended the execution itself, and the two Wolastoqiyik leaders stood next to the ocer in charge, apparently lending Indigenous legitimacy to a European execution and turning the ceremony into something of a hybrid aair. From Nichau Noite’s perspective, though, life still ended.4
