Many residential school children did not wait until after graduation to resist the oppressive program to which they were subjected. Like their parents, the pupils themselves had a variety of means to register their protest and try to change the conditions to which they objected. Even more so than the older generation, they were in a vulnerable position as inmates of institutions staffed by the object of their complaints, facilities that were sometimes far removed from countervailing home influences. However, vulnerability did not mean total incapacity or impotence. Residential school children had a range of sanctions from which to select, although their position usually led them to indirect forms of protest and complaint. They might, for example, seek outside help against the school officials, rather than tackling the situation themselves. Or they might register their objections by lack of cooperation and various forms of 'acting up.' In extreme cases they resorted to avoidance techniques that ranged from getting away from the source of the problem to a direct attack on the school. As was often the case in all sorts of institutional settings, the inmates showed an astonishing inventiveness and energy in combating and trying to reshape the forms and forces that held them.

      Within the walls of the schools themselves, disgruntled students were most likely to indicate their unhappiness with ridicule and a lack of cooperation. One practice that residential school students shared with pupils everywhere was the use of derisory nicknames for teachers and childcare workers. At Shubenacadie during Isabelle Knockwood's time as a student, some 'boys developed nicknames for various nuns based on elaborate and obscene wordplays in Mi'kmaw.' One of the girls would alter Latin words in hymns into ribald Micmac.

      Non-cooperation was more overt than name-calling. A former student of the Anglicans' Pelican Lake school vividly remembered an 'older boy' in one of her early classes who never participated in the work of the classroom. He simply sat stolidly at his desk ignoring everything around him. At Moose Factory, Billy Diamond defied a supervisor by refusing to finish his vegetables. The future chief 'sat without eating for eight hours, the plate in front of him and the supervisor pacing behind until finally, at two o'clock in the morning, with the vegetables cold and still untouched, the supervisor caved in and sent the boy up to the darkened dormitory, where dozens of boys still lay with their eyes closed, feigning sleep while they awaited the outcome of the vegetable stand-off.'