 The Great Sun and Death 
On November 28, 1729, the Natchez killed by surprise more than 200 French colonists, their neighbours and partners for several years, in a post located 250 km north of New Orleans, Louisiana. This article examines, from an anthropological perspective, the reasons for such a massacre. Why did the French presence spark such brutal action, in the form of collective murder? The article challenges the thesis of resistance to the colonial yoke, questioning how the Natchez found a place for settlers in their society. It thus emphasizes sacrifice as it prevails as a domestic ritual among the Natchez, and the contagious nature of death in this society, while placing the attack of 1729 within a made-up Native American history, in the lower valley of the Mississippi, of aborted ethnic cohabitations, which end in blood. The Franco-Natchez alliance, marked by spatial contiguity and daily interactions, may have emerged from an Indigenous device of dualist integration which finally came to a standstill.