When the Huron failed to deliver children for the new boarding school that the Jesuits had established, the French commandant re-emphasized the message that cooperation would bring corresponding, practical benefits. In a council, the commandant told them that ‘if they wished next year to give us an evidence of their affection, they should bring down some children to live with the French.‘ They, after all, were frequently ‘anxious to have some French to defend them.’ It should be obvious that ‘if they were willing to give twenty little Hurons, they would get in return twenty Frenchmen.’ A Jesuit missionary who had spoken to them on this subject and ‘with this in view, he had offered them some presents, and they had accepted them.’ But ‘now they failed to keep their word.’ The Jesuits were attempting to capitalize on the Huron practice of exchanging personnel to cement commercial or military alliances, as well as on Aboriginal notions of the reciprocity of giving and receiving.

      It is also clear that the black robes recruited children by preying on families in desperate straits and by making generous presents to those who surrendered their children. And, throughout, they found that they had to accommodate themselves to Native customs, expectations, and practices.

      For a variety of reasons, then, some Indian groups began - often grudgingly - to cooperate with the fledging seminary, and gradually the Jesuit experiment in boarding-school education got under way after 1636. A shortage of youths soon forced the priests to abandon their initial policy of segregating French and Indian students, but even efforts to teach the Natives and newcomers together proved highly frustrating from the beginning.