Within a generation of British Columbia's joining Confederation in 1871, the pacific province had developed a range of missions and boarding schools, often as a result of Indian initiative, that would make it distinctive among the regions of Canada.

    Like the Catholics, the Anglicans in British Columbia operated their missions and schools from the European metropole, whether in England or in France. The Methodists, in contrast, regarded their institutions at Coqualeetza and Port Simpson as the furthest extensions of a vast evangelical structure that was anchored to church headquarters in Toronto. The presence of all these denominations in British Columbia made that province one of the most fiercely contested regions.

In the prairie west, the mission school pattern that developed as the region was being drawn within the ambit of the new Dominion of Canada was different from that on the Pacific coast. As noted earlier, the Church Missionary Society had already established a brief presence at Red River in the 1820s, and somewhat later under one of John West's pupils, Henry Budd, at The Pas. Catholic missions and day schools dated from 1818 in Red River. The Oblates labored in the region from 1845 onward, and from the late 1850s the Grey Nuns were to be found at a number of sites in what would become Alberta. Prior to the time of Canada's acquisition of Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company in 1870, the Roman Catholic presence had not yet taken on the form of a boarding school. Rather the Oblates and sisters operated rudimentary day schools, or the priest traveled with and worked among the Indian and Métis groups of the plains without stressing education of the Aboriginal peoples.