As people became conscious of the institutionalised racism in the everyday life of staff and students, at least some of them attempted to modify the schools' operation to make it more sensitive to Aboriginal culture and values. The principal of the Anglicans' Blackfoot school in 1940 lobbied his church's Indian and Eskimo Residential School Commission not to send him a male teacher, because such an appointment 'would offend the Blackfoot conception of propriety to have a man teaching the girls.' On the Pacific, an unexpected problem arose from the students' strongly developed sense of rank and caste in schools that threw young people from different nations as well as different social orders together and expected them to operate on a basis of equality. 'Was it possible that the non-Indian staff expected them, young Haida "aristocrats," to set tables, make bread, peel potatoes for the sons of weaker nations?' In this case it 'took time and explaining before such equality was accepted by both sides as just another idiosyncrasy of people front Ontario and the Maritimes and Britain!' But the students were not totally convinced about the staff's professions of support for notions of egalitarianism: 'The novels of Dickens read by the seniors suggested that non-Indians had their inequalities too, a few dared to notice.'

      Where the inner nature of race relations in the residential schools revealed itself most graphically was in church responses to cases in which non-Native staff and Native students became involved emotionally and even romantically. Obviously, there is less evidence available on this unusual aspect of residential school life from the Roman Catholic organisations, who operated three-fifths of the schools. This silence does not mean that romantic, or at least sexual, relationships did not develop in the setting of the Roman Catholic schools. The Society of Jesus was embarrassed when one of its priests at Spanish became involved with an Indian woman on staff, and there was relief tinged with anxiety when he and she left the school. Needless to say, even clandestine affairs at Catholic institutions became known to Indian students and workers. However, since such liaisons violated church law, the usual resolution was that the priest was reassigned or that he left the school, perhaps with his partner. For non-Catholic missionaries who became involved with Natives, the consequences were more public and often extremely messy.