Was Kandiaronk in France? Kandiaronk, Adario, and “Indigenous Critique”

This paper reviews the evidence for the question of whether or not the Wendat leader Kandiaronk (c. 1649–1701) ever visited France, as claimed in the Dialogues Curieux by the Baron de Lahontan (1703) and recently argued by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything (2021). The fact that this voyage almost certainly did not take place confirms that Lahontan’s text is in significant ways a fiction. At the same time, the rhetorical function of the claim that it did take place shows that the text is also engaged in proto-ethnographic reportage. Lahontan’s Dialogues do offer a view of some form of “indigenous critique”; but the latter is only accessible through the literary codes of late-seventeenth-century France.