The Elk Across the Border

The Accused was a United States citizen living in Washington State. He belonged to the Lakes Tribe of the Colville Confederated Tribes, a successor group of the Sinixt people, whose traditional territory ran from what is now Washington State north into British Columbia. In the late 1800s the Sinixt gradually settled in the southern part of that territory. By 1930 one person was on the rolls of the Arrow Lakes Band in Canada, and after her death in 1956 the federal government declared the band extinct. In 2010 the Accused entered Canada legally and shot a cow elk in British Columbia, within Sinixt ancestral territory, without a licence, and told provincial authorities. He admitted the acts but said he was exercising an Aboriginal right to hunt protected by s. 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, which recognizes the rights of the 'aboriginal peoples of Canada'. Can a group now based outside Canada hold those rights?