Days before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the initial approval for the Trans Mountain pipeline, the RCMP reactivated a seemingly dormant list of Indigenous rights activists deemed potential "criminal threats," internal RCMP emails and documents show.

An RCMP intelligence initiative called Project Sitka, which concluded in March 2015, identified 89 individuals — Indigenous and non-Indigenous — that the Mounties determined were "willing and capable of utilizing unlawful tactics" during Indigenous rights protests, according to the documents, which include memos, emails and reports, provided to CBC News.

The RCMP launched Project Sitka to get a handle on Indigenous rights-related demonstrations which flared across the country, including Idle No More, from December 2012 until the end of 2013. The RCMP wanted to identify specific activists who had been arrested, arrested and chargedand convicted, create profiles and links to organizations across the country. After probing more than 300 activists, the RCMP came up with a list of 89 at the end of the intelligence project.

The documents showing reactivation of the list were obtained by Miles Howe, a cultural studies PhD candidate with Queen's University, through the Access to Information Act.

Please provide any updates to Project Sitka's list of disruptive and volatile subjects from respective divisions - Eric Stubbs in email to all RCMP divisions

The Sitka list had not been updated for over a year when a senior officer sent a request to divisions across the country for new information to add to the existing profiles, days before Trudeau's November 2016 announcement.

"We would like to update and, if required, add to