Herb Alex and James Baxter stand outside the new Sinixt Confederacy office in Nelson, B.C.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
A U.S. Indigenous group has established a formal presence in British Columbia and is pushing for government recognition and funding, two years after a Canadian Supreme Court ruling declared it “an Aboriginal people of Canada.”
The office of the Sinixt Confederacy occupies an unassuming space on the second floor of an office building in Nelson, B.C., the entrance marked by a sign that says, “We Are Still Here.”
Only a few people work here. But the office is a tangible sign of a disruptive Indigenous presence in Canada, as the Colville Confederated Tribes, headquartered in Washington state, seeks to influence the management of natural resources in Canada and make a claim to government funds – despite competing territorial claims from Canadian Indigenous nations, including the Okanagan and the Ktunaxa.
For the Colville, being in Nelson marks an important step in a lengthy process to right a historical wrong: Canada’s 1956 declaration that the Sinixt people had been extinguished from their territory in southeastern B.C. In 2010, Richard Desautel, a Colville member from Inchelium, Wash., shot a cow elk near Castlegar, B.C. He was charged for hunting without a licence and without being a resident of the province.
Mr. Desautel is a member of the Lakes Tribe of the Colville Confederacy, which he argued is a successor of the Sinixt, and as such he had the right to hunt in ancestral territory. In 2021, the Canadian Supreme Court agreed.
Two years later, “we’re working to get full management of our areas,” Colville chairman Jarred-Michael Erickson said in an interview.
The Nelson office could grow to 100 people, he said, with the capacity to manage wildlife and archaeology, but also to provide health and education services for members who may one day return to the Canadian lands where Sinixt historically lived.
“There’s a lot of work that can be done as our members move back up there,” Mr. Erickson said.
That, at least, is what the Colville hope to achieve.
To do so, they need to rewrite how governments treat a group that, until recently, did not officially exist in Canada.
They also need to navigate fractious disputes with Canadian Indigenous groups, whose territorial claims overlap with the 40,000 square kilometres of land in B.C. that the Colville claim – an area the size of Switzerland.
The Colville “won an appeal on a hunting case which states they can hunt in their traditional territory. However they were given an inch and took 500 miles – and are basically trying to erase our existence,” said Jason Louie, Chief of the Lower Kootenay Band, which is part of the Ktunaxa Nation.
“It’s our territory, not theirs,” said Clarence Louie, Chief of the Osoyoos Indian Band. Colville members have for decades come to Okanagan territory to study the shared nsyilxcən language, he said.
“If you speak the same language, you’re the same nation. You’re the same tribe,” Chief Louie said.
Courts and some historians have disagreed. A review of ethnographic and historical sources completed in October for the B.C. Attorney-General says records consistently characterize the Sinixt “as a separate and distinct geopolitical entity,” despite a common language with groups such as the Okanagan. Historical maps depict a large oval of “Lakes” land that extends from north of Revelstoke south past the U.S. border.
Archaeology shows a distinct Sinixt record in B.C., with people buried in a curled-up position, and homes in semi-subterranean pit houses, said Eileen Delehanty Pearkes, an author who has written about the Sinixt for decades.
The Sinixt “have five, six, seven thousand years of inhabitation, proven through their unique burial practices,” she said.
The Canadian Supreme Court, in the Desautel decision, did not precisely define what rights the Colville could assert, saying, “the duty to consult may well operate differently as regards those outside Canada.”
But the Colville are using their status as an Aboriginal people of Canada to reshape boundaries that are political, territorial and personal.
Among those working for the group in Canada is Herb Alex, a Canadian Okanagan member who is a Sinixt descendant and dual Canada-U.S. citizen. He is one of four people attached to the Nelson office, where he is a policy adviser.
“Some people from Okanagan Nation Alliance say that I’m a traitor, and some people from the Colville Confederated Tribes think I’m a spy,” he said. He has sought to defuse critics by changing the way he describes Colville ambitions.
“I’m not up here talking about my rights every chance I get. I’m talking about our responsibilities. And our responsibilities are to the ecosystem.”
But establishing rights in Canada is a key objective for the Colville. Representatives for the group have met twice with Murray Rankin, the B.C. Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation.
“Provincial staff meet monthly to engage on several issues, including Aboriginal Rights and a formalizing of an agreement for consultation within the territory,” Mr. Rankin said in a statement provided by a spokesperson.
Such an agreement could obligate consultation of the Colville on industrial projects or wildlife management issues in Sinixt territory. Colville members have already successfully sued Canadian mining giant Teck for pollution from its smelter in Trail, B.C.
The Colville are also pushing for a larger rights and recognition deal that “starts to move toward establishing what I might call a true government-to-government relationship, and to look forward to negotiations around historic impacts on the territory,” said Mark Underhill, a Vancouver lawyer who represents the Colville.
In the Desautel decision, “the key finding is the Sinixt are an Aboriginal peoples of Canada, with rights. And everyone has got to start dealing with that,” Mr. Underhill said.
In June, B.C. agreed to provide three Indigenous groups – the Ktunaxa Nation, Secwépemc Nation and Syilx Okanagan Nation – each 5 per cent of Canadian revenues received from the sale of hydroelectricity on the Columbia River system for four years. That percentage amounted to roughly $20-million each last year.
The Colville are arguing that they, too, should receive such payments, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, since Columbia dam construction flooded an estimated 90 per cent of Sinixt archeological resources. The Globe and Mail is not publishing the people’s names because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The B.C. Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation said in a statement the interim revenue-sharing agreements are “part of a collaborative bilateral process in relation to the Columbia River Treaty,” where the Ktunaxa, Secwépemc and Okanagan are participants in the Canadian negotiation team. The Colville are not.
The Colville demands have angered Canadian Indigenous groups, who see a well-funded U.S. organization competing for cash and influence.
Mr. Louie, the Lower Kootenay Chief, accused the Colville of engaging in a “land grab,” and acting “really aggressive in their approach.”
Legal clarification is needed on the Desautel decision, he said.
“The court needs to determine what this means, because they’re interpreting it to mean whatever they want it to mean – and nothing will change the fact that they’re a U.S.-based tribe.”
For now, the Colville are paying for the Nelson office. If the group succeeds in tapping government funds in Canada, it can add technical expertise, giving it a greater capacity to exert influence.
“There’s a lot of work going on in this region that the Sinixt should be involved with, and we’re hoping to change that,” said James Baxter, a biologist who works for the Colville in Nelson.