The most prominent - certainly the best remembered - of the means that schools used to try to bring about these changes was an assault on traditional Aboriginal practices, in particular the use of Native languages. As early as the 1850s the state had insisted that missionaries such as the Jesuits, who were evangelising on Manitoulin Island, use only English in their schools. (It was not clear if the main objection was to the use of an Indian language or to the employment of French alongside some English.) Later in the century, both Oblates and Anglican Church Missionary Society teachers, who were instructed by their superiors to learn the languages of their charges, frequently found themselves under pressure from Indian Affairs to use only English. The same was true, of early Methodist missionaries in Alberta who learned one or more Indian languages for proselytising and then found themselves obliged by the government to insist on the use only of English in the schools they ran. Over time, missionaries' facility in Aboriginal languages decreased. One fact certainly was the insistent pressure for suppression of Native languages in the residential schools that came from the bureaucracy.