Marie de l’Incarnation observed in 1668 that the Ursulines’ Indian pupils ‘cannot be restrained and if they are, they become melancholy and their melancholy makes them sick.’ European missionaries in New France never grasped the fact that the Aboriginal peoples had any educational system, let alone one that was so drastically different from the European that it doomed New France’s experiment in residential schooling to failure.

      Compound the alien and confining quality of European schooling with the problems of separation over long distances and the hovering threat of death from the Europeans’ mysterious diseases, and it is clear why both students and parents resisted or failed to cooperate with the missionaries’ well-intentioned efforts to recruit, confine and instruct the children of the various First Nations.

      A major reason that the experiment in residential schooling failed in New France was that an assimilative educational program made no sense in an extractive commercial economy or in a martial world where northeast woodland people were excellent warriors and allies just as they were.