Kandiaronk

(c. 1649 - 1701)

Kandiaronk, a Huron chief, died during negotiations for the Great Peace of Montreal treaty between French colonists and Indigenous leaders living near the Great Lakes. In 1703 the French explorer Louis-­Armand de Lom d’Arce, baron de Lahontan,​​ published an account of his nine years in New France that included a purported conversation between himself and Kandiaronk. “For the past six years, I have bent my thoughts upon the state of the Europeans, and I cannot see anything in their actions that is not beneath a man,” Kandiaronk argued. “I truly think it is impossible for it to be otherwise as long as you stick to your measures of mine and thine…To pretend you can live in the country of money and at the same time save one’s soul is as great a contradiction as for a man to go to the bottom of a lake to preserve his life.”