What made it possible for some Native groups to thwart the drive to wind up the residential school system completely was the relatively recent political consciousness and organisation of Aboriginal people throughout Canada. Efforts to organise politically had begun early in the twentieth century in British Columbia, where the long-festering land question had aroused a number of the First Nations. The first, ultimately abortive, attempt to forge a national political body was the League of Indians of Canada.

      A real beginning of national organisation occurred with the formation in the early 1960s of the National Indian Council (NIC), which served as a national lobbying body for Native groups of several types. The NIC enjoyed its greatest success when it set up a pavilion for Expo 67, the world's fair held in Montreal, that attracted attention from press and public to the problems that indigenous peoples faced in Canada.

      The National Indian Brotherhood emerged at one of the critical points in the evolution of Canada's Indian policy. Not only was the federal government pressing ahead in pursuit of its integration program, moving to close residential schools and replace them with hostels, but Ottawa was also about to announce its intention to terminate its responsibilities to Native peoples in the political fiasco known as the White Paper of 1969. The White Paper was a statement of intention on the part of the government of Canada, a determination to transfer responsibilities for Native affairs to the provinces, to move away from the obligations of the treaties, to phase out the separate legal category of 'status Indian,' and to wind up the operations of the Department of Indian Affairs. Its spirit was completely compatible with the integrative educational policy that Indian Affairs had been pursuing for more than fifteen years. But in the case of the White Paper, the ferocious and united reaction of Indian political groups, including the National Indian Brotherhood, rocked both bureaucrats and politicians back on their heels. Within little more than a year, the Prime Minister was conceding that the White Paper policy was dead.