Other student activities provided occasions for cooperating with groups outside an individual school, opportunities that sometimes created anxiety for school administrators. Lestock and Lebret forged unusual links in the early 1920s, when the Scouting movement was getting under way in the residential schools. Since in this period Lebret could not cluster enough Scouts for a full troop, Brother Leach arranged with the vice-principal of the Anglican school at Gordon's to establish a joint troop. Leach's superior worried about this unaccustomed religious integration.

       As Father Poulet's inquiry indicated, the Scouting movement that enjoyed departmental favour after the First World War was designed particularly to promote concepts of British-Canadian citizenship. At no time did anyone associated with these offshoots of the Baden-Powell movement appear to recognise the ironies associated with promoting Scouting in schools designed for the assimilation of young Natives. Scouting had initially been associated with the 'romance of empire' that was linked to Britain's holdings in far-off lands. The Canadian movement in particular placed a great deal of emphasis on woodcraft and survival techniques suitable for northern lands. That it was the height of irony to form organisations to teach forest lore and camping skills to Native youths whose schooling was supposed to modify them culturally into Euro-Canadians in everything but skin colour never seemed to dawn on the promoters of troops of Boy Scouts and bands of Wolf Cubs.

       School administrators were better with more traditional forms of recreation, such as music. As an Oblate put it, 'Teach a boy to blow a horn - he'll never blow a safe.'