During the development of Upper Canada, the lieutenant governor had repeatedly, though not invariably, negotiated acquisition of and entry to lands of various Ojibwa groups, both to relocate Mohawk allies who fought with the crown during the American Revolution and to facilitate the establishment of European agricultural settlement. This policy of preceding settlement and economic development with treaties that government thought gave them title to Indian lands was refined further in the two Robinson Treaties of 1850 that secured access to regions with mineral potential in northern Ontario. By the time Canada came to sort out how to prepare the western plains for development in 1870 and afterwards, it had well entrenched tradition to which to refer. But there was more to the process of making treaty in the 1870s than either long-term British and Canadian practice or the purposeful actions of the dominion government: the western Indians took a leading role, too.

    Western peoples were instrumental in ensuring that some of the seven treaties that emerged from that process included measures that would assist them in making a transition from a declining hunting economy to one more compatible with the farming economy that was invading their territories. Among these provisions were schools. Native motivation appears to have been similar to the strategy that earlier moved Indians in Upper Canada to cooperate with plans for manual labor or industrial schools. What is clear is that it was the Natives who proposed the inclusion of guarantees of schooling in the treaties, although they likely had day schools in mind.

    Certainly, Ottawa was not opposed to schooling. As Alexander Morris, who negotiated most of the treaties in the 1870s, put it during talks that led to Treaty 4 in 1874, 'The Queen wishes her red children to learn the cunning of the white man and when they are ready for it she will send schoolmasters on every Reserve and pay them. The government agreed to schooling, but it was the Native negotiators who suggested it and insisted on its inclusion in the earliest treaties.