Good morning.

A B.C. political leader issued a sharp warning to Ottawa last week, telling the federal government it was time to “wake up” to the creeping threat to Canada’s sovereignty from its southern neighbour.

This time, the alarm bells were coming from Clarence Louie, longtime chief of Osoyoos Indian Band and one of Canada’s most influential Indigenous leaders, and the threat he referred to is coming from a U.S. Indigenous group.

Louie was responding to two lawsuits filed last week by the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, a Washington State-based Indigenous group.

One argues the Colville Tribes should be allowed to participate in B.C.’s Indigenous Education Council program, which obligates school boards to consult local First Nations on how to bring Indigenous views and history into provincial classrooms.

The second lawsuit challenges a new B.C. policy in which the province says it will notify U.S.-based tribes of projects proceeding on their traditional land, but not involve them in more rigorous consultation processes except in special circumstances.

The lawsuits come four years after a landmark Canadian Supreme Court decision opened the door to such requests.

In 2021, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled constitutional rights protections for Indigenous peoples also apply to non-citizens who do not live in Canada but who can show their ancestors had ties to the land when Europeans arrived.

The ruling came in a test case involving an Indigenous hunter from Washington State who shot an elk in British Columbia in 2010 and was charged by a wildlife officer with violating provincial law.

The Supreme Court said the hunter has constitutional rights in Canada that protect him from those charges.

Legal experts said at the time that the judgment opened the door to Indigenous groups from outside Canada claiming title to lands within the country, including the right to be consulted during development projects.

Indigenous leaders in Canada applauded the decision at the time

“Indigenous peoples on both sides of the border see [the border] as the ultimate expression of colonization,” Bruce McIvor, a lawyer representing the Indigenous Bar Association, which intervened in the case, said in an interview with The Globe’s Sean Fine in 2021.

But the Colville Tribes’ actions since then have driven a deep wedge between the Canadian and U.S. Sinixt.

In 2023, the U.S. group opened an office in Nelson, B.C., as part of their efforts to pursue a claim to be the only rightful successor to the Lakes people, a group whose Indigenous distinctness was noted by early explorers and cartographers before Canada declared it extinct in 1956.

That same year, a B.C. atlas showed the Lakes Tribe historically occupying roughly 40,000 square kilometres of B.C., an area roughly the size of Nova Scotia.

They also claim they are owed a share of money flowing from hydroelectric dams in the region.

Last year, the Okanagan Nation Alliance, the group in Canada, called on B.C. and the federal government, as well as industry, to limit the influence of the Colville Tribes and their position that they deserve a say in how companies build projects in large parts of southern B.C.

But Canadian Indigenous leaders such as Louie maintain the Sinixt are well represented by their brethren in Canada.

“I’m Sinixt, too,” he said in an interview last week with The Globe’s Nathan VanderKlippe.

He said his own great-grandfather was also a Colville member, until the U.S.-based group booted him from its ranks in the 1950s after discovering he was living in B.C.

“They played that border and disenrolled a lot of people,” Louie said.

He contrasted that with recent years, when “they’re saying there shouldn’t be a border.”

Colville chairman Jarred-Michael Erickson accused Canadian Indigenous groups of perpetuating historical injustices.

“We were fighting colonialism; we were declared extinct. Now we’re fighting a different form from our own – other First Nations and Indigenous people."

Other U.S. tribes have already begun to seek rights on port and mining projects in the B.C. Lower Mainland and in its northwestern “Golden Triangle” region.

Last week, B.C. Premier David Eby promised to fight back in court,

Said Louie: “You can’t be letting these, these American citizens … have modern say in modern activities up here. That’s for First Nations. We cover that base.”

This is the weekly British Columbia newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.