Le Jeune noted in 1636 that he and his colleagues hoped ‘that in the course of time we shall make something out of our wandering Savages. I say nothing of the sedentary ones, like the Hurons and other Tribes who live in villages and cultivate the land. If we had a grain of hope for the former, who are fickle and wandering, we have a pound, so to speak, for the latter, who lived clustered together.’

      Initially, the followers of Loyola (the Jesuits) continued the practice of sending a small number of promising Indians to France for education, but they quickly realized that the results of these efforts were meager and that the Indians opposed the practice. By 1633 Le Jeune had concluded that ‘these people may be converted by means of seminars’ and that it was essential to educate them at Quebec, ‘for they will give them [their children] if they see that we do not send them to France.’

      There were other anticipated benefits from educating Native children in North America, more especially in residential schools. Like their Récollet predecessors, the Jesuits thought that educating young Indians meant that ‘we shall have a number of them who will afterwards serve in the conversion of their compatriots.’

      Indeed, a ‘seminary’ or boarding school would be essential to accommodate children who had lost their parents, whenever church agencies established, as the Jesuits hoped they would, a hospital to care for sick Indians. As Le Jeune observed in his chronicle of missionary events in 1636, a hospital operated by female religious ‘will fill the Seminaries with boys and girls; for the children of those who die there, will belong to them.’