Okanagan Indian Band opposes rail corridor sale

December 16, 2014 - 3:03 PM Info-Tel Multimedia by Charlotte Helston
VERNON - The Okanagan Indian Band is voicing its opposition to the recent sale of the discontinued rail corridor between Kelowna and Vernon. In a release issued Tuesday, Chief Byron Louis said the band is advancing a land claim for the Commonage Reserve, through which a large portion of the corridor runs. Okanagan municipalities recently inked a deal with CN Rail to buy the corridor for $22 million. Louis said while 2.5 km of the corridor that goes through the Duck Lake reserve was excluded from the deal, there’s been little said about the much larger chunk that traverses the Commonage Reserve. “The Commonage Reserve was allotted by the Joint Reserve Commission in 1877 and without consultation, the land was taken back. The OKIB has never lawfully surrendered our title to the land,” Louis said. The Okanagan Indian Band advanced a specific claim for the Commonage Reserve, which would stretch roughly from Oyama to the Vernon Army base, in 2002, Louis said, and while Canada originally accepted the claim for negotiations, they later withdrew. “In our eyes, the resolution of the OKIB’s entitlement to the Commonage Reserve remains outstanding business,” Louis said. “We had hoped that the wave of reconciliation from coastal cities like Vancouver would have washed over the Okanagan.” In 2012, during a land dispute between the Musqueam Indian Band, a land developer and the Province, Mayor Gregor Robertson of Vancouver publicly supported the Musqueam. A “Year of Reconciliation,” was declared in 2013-2014 by the City of Vancouver and a unanimous vote by the Mayor and Council of Vancouver recognized the city was founded on unceded First Nations territory. “We offered the mayors the opportunity to back our claim,” Louis said. “First, it would have helped to build much needed bridges between parties and cultures and second, it would have saved the tax payers 22 million dollars.” The Okanagan Indian Band has forwarded the matter to legal counsel for further review and action. Okanagan municipalities are currently in the midst of a 120-day window in which they will finalize funding sources for the $22 million deal.
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Also See:  http://www.kelownacapnews.com/news/286018111.html
and  http://okib.ca/commonage/
and http://www.vernonmorningstar.com/news/286018321.html

and http://vimeo.com/114701872  The Okanagan Indian Band produced this video to outline the history of the IR #9 Commonage Reserve