I just wanted to say that I am skeptical of this portion of the narrative.
Were the graves really unmarked? Or were they marked with wood crosses or wood markings that may have been removed (by vandals) or simply rotted away over time as the graveyard became overgrown due to not being kept up? Have we forgotten that these schools date back to the 1800's? This was a time when not everyone had a car or even a telephone.
I've searched all the news stories and I have yet to see any photographs of the site itself. It's just being fed to us that they were unmarked and assumed that it was to cover up mistreatment.
So many assumptions are being made without even looking at the death records (which do exist, it would just be a lot of work to dig them out of non-digital archives).
As for why the kids were not returned to their parents for burial, the answer is that in cases where parents could not be located, the residential schools became the sole caregiver of the children meaning there would not have been a family to return the bodies too. So, naturally, they would have done their best to provide the dead some sort of burial.
Google maps says that it's a 44 to 50 minute run (assuming the highway bridge was always there, which is most likely wasn't).
So when you say "5 minutes away," you're a filthy liar, just like the CBC.
In any case, the fact that there were records to destroy shows that they actually were keeping a record. Should they have been digitized? Probably, but maybe they didn't have the technology.
It's am assumption that they did all this to cover something up. Like I said before, many of these kids didn't have a family or were unwanted. They died from natural causes in most cases, and burying them is the obvious thing to do.
The city of Kamloops starts right after the bridge. That's a kilometer. You added another two to get through the whole city.
https://imgur.com/EurWssd.png
Also, 3.4 km in 45 minutes is walking not running.
No I didn't. That's where downtown is. In the 1800's the city would have been smaller as well.
It wasn't much smaller. Here is a map from 1930. The city already goes up to the 14th avenue, just like today.
https://ekistics.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/6-Insurance-Plan-of-Kamloops-thompson-river-city-centre.jpg
The residential school was build just 5 minutes away from the city, even in the 1800s.