Native attitudes towards Euro-Canadian schooling in the pre-confederation era were characterized by two patterns, only one of which persisted after 1867. First, those groups that accepted, or in some cases sought, boarding schools did so as part of a clearly thought-out strategy of coping with the change the Europeans brought. The second defining feature of pre-Confederation forays into the field of boarding school education was that the Europeans had to negotiate with - sometimes even entreat - the aboriginal population to cooperate with their pedagogical efforts.

      After Confederation, many Native leaders continued to pursue schooling as part of a strategy of adaptation, but now the state was less willing to listen to their views or accommodate their wishes.

      The Government of Canada was even less willing to listen to and accommodate Native desires by the late 1870s. The negotiation of seven treaties in the west in the 1870s forced Ottawa to formulate a schooling policy, but simultaneously the collapse of the plains buffalo economy left the Native inhabitants weakened and unable to compel the government to create the ‘schools on reserves’ that the treaties promised.

      When the newly created Department of Indian Affairs did fashion a school policy in 1883, however, it was one that answered the needs and pandered to the prejudices of missionaries and bureaucrats. Because missionary teachers, many of whom were already active in the prairie and Pacific regions by the 1880s, opposed day schools as inefficient and favoured cultural assimilation as a means of working conversion, the federal government adopted a policy that clearly violated promises made in treaty negotiations.