A major contributing factor to health problems was the rundown condition and the insufficiency of supplies that prevailed in many of the schools.

      The schools and their non-Native officials have to bear most of the responsibility for the problems that arose in the domain of supervision and care of the school children. Regardless of who set the rules and who was the paymaster, the missionaries and their employees were the people on the spot supervising and taking care of the young people. When it came to problems of inadequate supervision, excessive punishment, and the various forms of student abuse that cropped up in many of the schools, it was the missionary organisations that bore the principal responsibility.

      It was ironic that missionary organisations were so culpable because usually it was they who had expressed the most interest in the welfare of the Native peoples. Down to the late nineteenth century, when Canadian society in general had shown no interest or even open hostility to the indigenous population, it had been representatives of the Christian denominations who sought to minister to them and to intervene on their behalf with government authorities to protect them from rapacious non-Natives who coveted their land or who mistreated them.

      Staff at residential schools often were exceptional people who genuinely cared for and took a serious interest in the children. Nonetheless, the residential school system as a whole is remembered for the damage wrought by the indifferent, the insensitive, the hostile, and the downright sadistic. One common manifestation of the indifference were the deplorable conditions under which school children often lived, learned, and worked. The fact that the Presbyterian school in northwest Ontario was built at the turn of- the century without eavestroughing and mosquito screens resulted in such misery in the dormitories that, on one occasion, four of the students were removed by their parents. The same denomination's schools at File Hills and Alberni were so cramped that for 'two years now the oldest boys have been sleeping in a tent' at one, and cramped dorms could not accommodate standard six-foot beds at the other.

      Birtle school was considered 'nothing short of a disgrace' by the Presbyterians' Women's Foreign Missionary Society, with two of its three furnaces defective and little or no heat reaching the boys' attic dormitories during the prairie winter.