Travel literature seems to occupy a choice spot among the least popular topics of literary history in Québec and France. And this is so evident that, without the central role played by the “author-function” (Foucault), the corpus of travel narratives retained in the canon would probably be even more restricted. In sum, it still possible to ask a question such as: “What would be the Voyage en Amérique without Chateaubriand?” This article examines the institutional reception of three vastly different colonial texts : Michel Leiris’ L’Afrique fantôme, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil by Jean de Léry, as well as Le grand voyage du pays des Hurons by Gabriel Sagard. In particular, I will focus on the case of Sagard, in order to propose a re-reading of the atypical corpus of Nouvelle France and the colonial memory it contains.