Anglican Church assumed de facto administrative responsibility in the far-flung wilderness of Canada and British North America. The church contracted with colonial officials and later the federal Crown to administer residential schools for the indigenous peoples of the First Nations – a decision which would come back to haunt it much later. Such schools removed children from their home communities in an attempt to, among other things, "kill the Indian in the child" and forcibly assimilate them into the dominant European culture and language. Emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of the children was rife in these schools. At the same time, Anglican missionaries were involved in advocating for First Nations rights and land claims on behalf of those people to whom they were ministering (for example, the Nisga'a of northern British Columbia). One of the earliest First Nations students to be educated at Red River in the 1830s was Henry Budd. He was ordained in 1850 and was the first First Nations priest and became the missionary at Fort Cumberland on the Saskatchewan River and then to the post of The Pas. The Anglican Church of Canada's Prayer Book commemorates Henry Budd on 2 April. Despite this growth in both the size and role of the church, progress was intermittently undermined by internal conflict over churchmanship. This was manifested in the creation of competing theological schools (Trinity versus Wycliffe Colleges in the University of Toronto, for example), a refusal by bishops of one ecclesiastical party to ordain those of the other, and – in the most extreme cases – schism. This latter phenomenon was famously and acrimoniously borne out in the high profile defection of Edward Cridge, the Dean of the Diocese of British Columbia in Victoria, B.C., together with much of his cathedral congregation, to the Reformed Episcopal Church in 1874, although the movement was ultimately confined to that one congregation in a then-remote town together with a second parish in New Westminster, the then-capital of the originally separate mainland colony of British Columbia. Overseas mission In 1888, the Church began its missionary activities in Central Japan, which would later result in the formation of the Diocese of Chubu in the Anglican Church in Japan. A Church of England conference held in Winnipeg in August 1890 established the union of all synods. Missionaries from Canada to Japan included Archdeacon Alexander Croft Shaw, minister to the British Legation in Tokyo,