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My research aims at understanding and at comprehend the esthetic and formal qualities of the graphic creation stemming from cultural and artistic activities of the First Nation Innue-Naskapi (Northeastern Quebec-Labrador) looking at the period from the 18th to 20th century, the golden age in its decline, a period which had left us by the eloquent and significant artifacts of an assumed and sophisticated craft and artistic activity.

The study includes mainly ceremonial tunics decorated with abstract graphic compositions and made from skins of caribou. The compositions are essentially constituted by geometrical and floral motives. The artists-designers used mineral-organic pigments. The motives painted by means of tools sculptured in caribous’ wood.

Artifacts studied within the reserves of the Canadian and American museums were before bought by the first European colonists, and wealthy and informed collectors. Some of these artworks which made the pride of numerous British, French and German private collections, were repatriated in America and are now a part of collections of the biggest national Canadian and American museums of anthropology and of archaeology today, notably part of the American Indian Collection Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C.

I interviewed elders, artists and native representatives, in diverse reserves of Quebec, to discuss their memories, an attempt to establish a bridge between the present and the past, the Native and non Native.

My whole approach gave me the opportunity to light up some aspects and challenges of the native creators-designers’ artistic. I shall deal here with the pictorial, vernacular and esthetic aspect of the work, the formal creative approach, the originality as well as with the quality, the strength and the diversity of the artistic compositions.