“I had much conversation with them regarding the source of the great river and regarding their country … they spoke to me of these things in great detail, showing me by drawings all the places they had visited, taking pleasure in telling me about them.”

—Samuel de Champlain, Les Voyages, 1613

He may have been one of the greatest explorers and cartographers of his era, but Samuel de Champlain didn’t hesitate to give credit where it was due. He certainly does so in the passage above, which describes how the Huron people helped him navigate the wilds of New France and, ultimately, create maps such as the one shown above, Champlain’s first detailed depiction of the territory and one of the first to illustrate parts of the Great Lakes.

European explorers relying on Indigenous geographic knowledge wasn’t a new tactic. During Jacques Cartier’s voyage of 1541-42, for instance, Iroquois guides used sticks and twigs to show him the course of the St. Lawrence River and the location of rapids and waterfalls. But Champlain counted on Indigenous expertise like no other white man had. Whatever his motivations were — colonial glory, commercial riches, conversion of the “savages” to Christianity — Champlain knew that “the way to overcome physical obstacles to exploration was to become accepted by the Native people and learn to proceed with their help,” as Conrad Heidenreich notes in The Beginnings of French Exploration out of the St. Lawrence Valley: Motives, Methods, and Changing Attitudes towards Native People.