That demand for schools was part of a larger strategy of adjustment emerged in speeches by leaders such as Mistawasis (Big Child) and Ahtahkakoop (Star Blanket), Cree headmen prominent in the negotiation of Treaty 6 in 1876. During a caucus of chiefs, Mistawasis tied together the disappearing buffalo economy and the alternative that treaty with Canada offered. Ahtahkakoop, like Mistawasis, was in a long line of Indian leaders who perceived in the European's learning an alternative for desperate people.

    It was as a result of such thinking, and pursuant to Aboriginal rather than government prodding, that a provision was inserted in each of the seven treaties signed in the 1870s promising a school on their reserve 'whenever the Indians shall desire it.'

    What was not clear to the chiefs of Treaty 6 (or, for that matter, to the governor general) was that Ottawa was in the process of shifting from its treaty commitment to establish a school 'on the reserve whenever the Indians wanted one', to the provision of residential schools off reserve instead. What intervened and led the government to deviate from its commitment to western Indian education were both economic and social factors. First and foremost, the virtual disappearance of the buffalo by 1879 brought home to government and Natives the fact that immediate action would be required to assist Plains Indians in making a transition from a hunting economy to an agricultural one.

    Some government officials, and most of the missionaries of the Christian denominations to which Ottawa looked to carry out many of its treaty promises inexpensively, also preferred off-reserve residential institutions to the day schools the western treaties had promised.