It is highly likely that these cultural differences bearing on pedagogy and discipline combined to make the residential school experience more onerous and painful for Native students than it would have been to Euro-Canadian children. To some degree the differences in the cultural background and expectations that staff and student brought to the school also explain the failure or the refusal of staff to appreciate the degree of suffering, emotional and physical, that they were inflicting on children. Clearly this is not what accounts for the extreme cases of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse that were perpetrated by some. Rather, aberrant personalities, racial prejudice, and an absence of countervailing power are what account for the misfits, perverts, and sadists.

      Residential schools, which touched only a minority of status Indian and Inuit children directly, then, were merely one important cog in a machine of cultural oppression and coercive change. The difficulty for the analyst is to separate out and weigh the influence of the residential school from this complex of interwoven forces.

      In global terms, one generalisation that must be made is that residential schools had a seriously negative influence on individual students and on Native communities. This is not to deny the legitimacy or accuracy of former students who remember residential school days with fondness.

      Equally valid, of course, are the recollections of those whose mind's eye sees a totally negative experience. Typically, these former students found their self-concept and sense of self-worth so crushed by the treatment to which they were subjected at school that they veered into a life of anti-social and self-destructive behaviour. Stories of long bouts of serious alcoholism, involvement with the criminal justice system, and bare survival on the margins of Euro-Canadian society are common.