The Haida Gwaii Lesson by Mark Dowie In The Haida Gwaii Lesson: A Strategic Playbook for Indigenous Sovereignty, journalist Mark Dowie examines the Haida Gwaii’s decades-long battle for sovereignty. It’s the story of a how a small, remote Indigenous band on the northern B.C. coast organized, lobbied and blockaded over 50 years to gain control from governments and logging companies over their islands and their resources. “Blockades don’t work by themselves,” a former president of the Haida Nation remarked. “There needs to be a legal strategy. But a legal strategy won’t work by itself either. We had the courts, our alliances and blockades all working together while we developed and negotiated a land-use plan. Timing was always at the forefront of our minds, and our timing was good.”