The Writings of the Oblate Missionaries of Mary Immaculate on the Montagnais-Naskapi in the Second Half of the 19th Century
This paper is the result of work over many years in the missionary archives and with published texts, aimed at collecting data of an ethnographic nature concerning the Innu, written by Oblate missionaries in the second part of the 19th century. From hundreds of texts collected, 28 have been selected and analyzed using a list of keywords grouped under sixteen themes, according to the components of a classical anthropological monograph. The content is organized in three main sections: the existence of a continuity between the Montagnais culture of the 17th century and that of the 19th century; the comparison between the information provided by the Jesuit Le Jeune concerning the Montagnais religion and those of the Oblates; an outline of the cultural changes affecting them during the second part of the 19th century. The objectives of the paper are to make known to the interested researchers the most important of these texts, to present a summary of them and also to evaluate their ethnographic contribution to the knowledge of Innu society and culture.