“Lots of times growing up, I’d just try to do something myself because I believed that being a boy, and being Indian, I should just know how to do things." -Will Bird, Through Black Spruce”

“I thought of my mother late that night, after leaving Dorothy, as I followed the moon's path back home across the Moose River. My mother, maybe she was in that moon's light. I didn't know any more, but when I was younger, Iuse to imagine that she was. I'd talk to the moon some nights, and I knew my mother listened. I haven't done that in a long time, me." -Through Black Spruce, Joseph Boyden, ch 13, pg 119”

“There’s something sexy in cooking for a man who likes my food. Am I growing up?”

“When I die, nieces, I want to be cremated, my ashes taken up in a bush plane and sprinkled onto the people in town below. Let them think my body is snowflakes, sticking in their hair and on their shoulders like dandruff.”

“Mother Nature was one angry slut. She'd try and kill you the first chance she got. You'd screwed with her for so long that she was happy to eliminate you.”

“Build it all up, and it all falls down. It all burns down. Everything you need can be taken. Remember that, nieces. Everything you hold dear, it can be taken.”

“Tout ce que je sais, c'est qu'il n'existe pas de héros dans ce monde. Pas vraiment. Rien que des hommes et des femmes devenus vieux et fatigués qui n'ont plus la force de lutter pour ce qu'ils aiment.”