Lr won’t allow access to edit “local” vs “cloud”

So for the past few years I've exclusively edited from my iPad Pro and loved it, made editing a breeze. It took a while to get used to the cloud based version because I started out with LrC. 

I used to import all photos through Lightroom onto my external hard drive so that I could not store them locally to save processing speed for my computer. We'll, since then I've not edited any photos on my Mac or MacBook and am trying to go back to using my Mac so I can have more editing power and full access to Lr and Ps. But the programs seem different now. When I go to import, there's an option for "cloud" and "local" & "sd card". When I go to click "local" it populates my external hard drive then when I click on it, it tells me "the folder " Achuff 5tb" cannot be opened because you don't have the permission to see its contents". Can anyone help?