Numerous other institutions provided examples of parents recoiling against dangerous school conditions. The Oblate establishment at Fort Frances, Ontario, had problems with parents withholding children after a period in which an unpopular principal had alienated the Native community. On James Bay in the late 1930s, the Oblates complained about parents who withdrew their children from the Roman Catholic school and placed them in the Anglican institution. The Anglicans' turn to suffer came in the late years of the Second World War. In 1944 their Moose Factory school 'reported that only 35 children are in residence this year out of a possible enrolment of 100.' The principal proposed to respond to 'the critical attitude of the Indian parents' with 'compulsion,' but that did not prove feasible. Instead, the Anglican missionary body suggested 'that the transfer of Principal Thompson to another school was advisable, in view of the attitude taken by the Indians.' The principal objected and asked for an Indian Affairs inspection, the result of which was his removal from the Moose Factory school.

      As effective as refusal to cooperate by withholding children could be, sometimes parents felt forced to go beyond these forms of passive resistance. There were infrequent instances of direct assertions of power by Native groups. There tended to be a recurring pattern to such exercises of force: outbreaks of student and parental violence occurred at a school during a period of friction, often after other forms of complaint proved unavailing. In part, the 1895 murder on the Blackfoot reserve and the threat to shoot the Anglican boarding school principal there was an example of how the anger, in that case a bereaved father aroused by the death of his daughter, could erupt into violence.