Syilx Chiefs condemn UBC professors’ legal challenge Indigenous land acknowledgement – Fernie BC News
“Attempts to silence these acknowledgements are attempts to erase Syilx Okanagan presence and rights”
The Okanagan Nation Alliance (ONA) and the Chiefs of Syilx Okanagan Nation are responding with “profound disappointment” to a petition filed by four professors and one graduate student from the University of B.C. Vancouver and Okanagan over the school’s breach of the University Act regarding its Indigenous land acknowledgement.
Philosophy professor Andrew Irvine, political science professor Christopher Kam, English professor Michael Treschow, political science associate professor Brad Epperly and graduate student Nathan Cockram, filed a petition in B.C. Supreme Court on April 7, seeking an order that UBC must prohibit and restrain “from engaging in political activity within the meaning of s. 66 of the University Act… which requires that ‘[a] university must be non-sectarian and non-political in principle’.”
