The impact on Native society of the residential schools' systematic assault on Aboriginal identity cannot be measured fully or precisely. While there are many former students who testify to the damage that the suppression of their language and other things did to them and to people they knew, there are also former students who firmly deny that their school experience scarred them or their fellow students. It is also important to remember that there were exceptional individuals who respected Indian ways and made no effort to suppress language and identity. The Anglicans' St Michael's school at Alert Bay in British Columbia not only had totem poles for its entrance but in the 1930s was led by a principal, Earl Anfield, who respected the Indian community, understood their language, and treated the children under his care considerately.

      Principal Anfield was not unique. Nor was he the only school official to encourage the use of Indian materials and motifs in his institution. In fact, the ways in which some of the schools used aspects of Indian culture for public purposes betrayed the ambivalence that many missionaries felt about the indigenous peoples. It would be easy to dismiss the displays of Indian costume and artefacts as either naive or cynical celebrations of the folkloric elements of Aboriginal culture. But schools often employed costumed Indians in pageant-style productions that implied that the school authorities were at least conscious of the important relationship between themselves and the original people. The message of such events seemed to be that even when schools used indigenous culture in their celebrations, it was in an ambiguous or implicitly patronising way that did little to lessen the assimilative message that students would draw from the rules, curricula, and staff behaviour.