Aboriginal criticism stemmed fundamentally from the failure of government and Canadian society at large to heed their views. The 1946-8 Special Joint Committee, in which parliament listened to Native demands for more control and more economically useful schooling and then rejected them in favour of the officially sanctioned program of assimilation through integration, left a 'sense of frustration by native groups because the government was not addressing their concerns.' Simultaneously, the committee's hearings had spread awareness among many groups that their problems were shared widely in Aboriginal communities. That exasperation was only heightened late in the 1950s when the federal government, still obviously at a loss what to do about an Indian Act and an Aboriginal policy that demonstrably were not successful, caused yet another special parliamentary committee to be struck to examine, among other things, Indian schools.

      The voice of Aboriginal criticism, which again did not stimulate any focused response from the 1959-60 Special Joint Committee, was joined in the 1960s by expressions of missionary disillusionment and reconsideration of strategy. One clear example of the process of redefining the missionary purpose was Beyond Traplines, 'an Assessment of the Work of the Anglican Church of Canada with Canada's Native Peoples,' which was published in 1969. Not only did author Charles Hendry report damaging testimony about the residential schools, but he criticised the racist assumptions that lay behind much of the missionary program and called for the Church of England to stand politically with Native people in pursuit of their economic and political aims.

      Running parallel with the movement of the churches was a process of demystification carried out almost unwittingly by the federal government in the 1960s, a phenomenon that destroyed the legitimacy of government policy in general and Native educational policy in particular. In large part for the same reason that it had struck joint parliamentary committees in the 1940s and 1950s -- that is, for lack of a clear idea of what it wanted to do -- Ottawa sponsored a series of inquiries that depicted residential schools in harsh and unforgiving terms.