We began with looking for themes in Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, and Ian Gill’s, All That We Say is Ours. They each talk about memory, symbols of victory and the attitude with which we remember successful events.

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Solnit argues that we need litanies to our most important victories and Ian Gill argues that the protest on Lyell Island has been immortalized in the Lyell Island song, which later became the Haida’s national anthem.

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The Lyell Island protest was integral in the creation of Gwaii Haanas National Park and Reserve and is infrequently acknowledged as such in academic literature. Media sources fully credit the protest as the turning point it was. This indicated to us that in colloquial and demotic conversation the protest carried the correct significance but in academic literature it is not fully nor correctly understood and possibly not acknowledged at all.