From Queen Charlotte to Haida Gwaii The ascent of the Haida and the struggle with Canada http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/3248

But if Canada has embraced the culture of Indigenous peoples, especially the Haida, it has been a great deal more resistant to their political claims. The provincial and federal governments jealously guard their exclusive reign over the land. The outcome for First Nations' traditional territories has usually been straightforward: its undisturbed apportioning-off to private industry.

In Haida Gwaii, the old growth treasures proved irresistable to timber barons, who brought industrial logging to the islands in the early 1900s. Enormous, tough spruce trees became the favoured material for WW2 fighter planes. As part of British Columbia's "resource industrial complex," Gill writes, forestry operations were guaranteed deep support from politicians, in exchange for healthy contributions to government coffers. All the big corporate names— MacMillan, Rayonier, Brascan—eventually took part in the lucrative island industry. They laid bare hillsides with mechanized savagery, moving assuredly to take more and more, from one island to the next.