Since the new body of officials who were responsible after 1830 for the development of policy little understood or valued Indians, they easily came to the conclusion that it would be best for both Natives and Britain if the indigenous peoples were refashioned into something more compatible with the expanding British-Canadian agriculture frontier. Assimilation through evangelization, education, and agriculture would have to be the policy after 1830, because more coercive methods of achieving the 'Euthanasia of savage communities' were inimical, expensive, and politically dangerous.

    It would take more than a decade before the state focused, at the Orillia conference, on residential schooling as the preferred medium for assimilation, and even longer until the state, the various Christian churches, and the Indians worked out a detailed program for schooling. First, the state attempted in the 1830s to adopt reserves as a means of settling and assimilating Indians in Upper Canada. However, this experiment at Sarnia and near Lake Simcoe failed abysmally, although parallel Methodist efforts that in some ways resembled the Jesuits' activities at Sillery in the seventeenth century proved somewhat more successful.

    Next, there was a setback to the assimilationist policy during the governership of Sir Francis Bond Head, who sought to dispossess Indians of agricultural lands and relocate them in distant regions to live out the remainder of what he was confident were their dwindling days. Significantly, an uproar from the Wesleyan Methodists, the Aborigines Protection Society, and the Society of Friends (Quakers) alarmed the British authorities and forced them to recant their support for Bond Head's Draconian policy.