In 1907, both the Montreal Star and Saturday Night reported on a medial inspection of the schools that found aboriginal children were dying in astonishing numbers. The magazine called the 24 per cent national death rate of aboriginal children in the schools (42 per cent counting the children who died at home, where many were sent when they became critically ill), "a situation disgraceful to the country.' And concluded: "Even war seldom shows as large a percentage of fatalities as does the educational system we have imposed on our Indian wards."

      At Kuper Island, where Emily Rice and hundreds of other children were confined, the Indian Affairs department's own files estimate that up to 40 per cent of the students died before they could return home. At the File Hills industrial school in Saskatchewan, 69 per cent of students died of tuberculosis during one decade at the turn of the century.

      Although the worst horror stories about conditions were found in the pre-1914 period, conditions at some schools continued to be below acceptable standards even into the more affluent post-1945 period.

      Inadequate supervision and deficient funding also accounted fo other types of neglect. For one thing, the sheer difficulty and expense of sending pupils home for summer holidays often accounted for the protracted separation from family for which residential schools wee notorious. Much more common were the cases where students languished in schools for years with little or no contact with home, in part because insufficient or indifferent staff made transmission of pupils to their homes difficult.

      Insufficient staff also went far to explain some of the appalling accidents that occurred in the residential schools. Of course, it would have been impossible to supervise scores or even hundreds of young people around the clock, no matter how numerous and well trained staff members were. But clearly a paucity of staff and a tendency to overwork what staff there were made the occurrence of accidents much more likely.