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“Thus the white men and Native Americans were able, through the spirit of goodwill and compromise, to reach the first in what would become a long series of mutually beneficial, breached agreements that enabled the two cultures to coexist peacefully for stretches of twenty and sometimes even thirty days, after which it was usually necessary to negotiate new agreements that would be even more mutual and beneficial, until eventually the Native Americans were able to perceive the vast mutual benefits of living in rock-strewn sectors of South Dakota.”
― Dave Barry, Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States

“From when she was young, Molly had learned that the fence was an important landmark for the Mardudjara people of the Western Desert who migrated south from the remote regions. They knew that once they reached Billanooka Station, it was simply a matter of following the rabbit-proof fence to their final destination, the Jigalong government depot; the desert outpost of the white man. The fence cut through the country from south to north. It was a typical response by the white people to a problem of their own making. Building a fence to keep the rabbits out proved to be a futile attempt by the government of the day.

For the three runaways, the fence was a symbol of love, home and security.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“I like that the Aborigines say dogs make people human”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“We have always been here
We are still here
We are not going anywhere”
― Claire G. Coleman, Terra Nullius

“These people who were used to walking around the desert without clothing could not understand why or what covering one's nakedness had to do with the seeking and the acceptance of food and sanctuary.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“As the car disappeared down the road, old Granny Frinda lay crumpled on the red dirt calling for her granddaughters and cursing the people responsible for their abduction. In their grief the women asked why their children should be taken from them. Their anguished cries echoed across the flats, carried by the wind. But no one listened to them, no one heard them.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“You should have seen the other ones who were locked up for running away," she said. "They all got seven days punishment with just bread and water. Mr Johnson shaved their heads bald and made them parade around the compound so that everyone could see them. They got the strap too.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“The bureaucrats were accountable to their political masters, not accountable to the people whom they were overseeing. And putting it as bluntly as possible, no government ever won votes by spending money on Indians.”
― Charlie Angus, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream

“The conjunction of the 'straightest', most austere product of the Northern hemisphere—the presbyterian, the Anglo-Saxon, the quintessential hyperborean, in his pride and his theology—and the most primitive, regressive, impotent and also the most unselfconscious element that the Antipodes concealed under the sun: the Aboriginals. The clash resulted in the quasi-total extermination of the Antipodean, but the Southern hemisphere has not perhaps pronounced its last word yet.

The Aboriginals were certainly had. They were led to claim for themselves stretches of land which in the days when they had been left alone they had roamed through as nomads with never a thought of ownership. Their claim was directed towards an object they had never possessed and which they would have thought it contemptible and sacrilegious to possess. Typical Western cunning. In return they have palmed off an even deadlier virus on to us—the virus of origins.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“The native needed vast space in his own domain, freedom, unlimited movement, and time to gather his own bush food and water so necessary to provide a diet that was instinctive to him, and as definite as the centuries. The country was far too poor to support large community groups, and thus most of the time they must hunt and collect bush foods in small groups or families. Every advance of the white settler interfered with known supplies of food and water. Gradually the bewildered remnants of once strong tribal units either moved into the nearest white settlements and lost their tribal beliefs in beggary, or turned to the Mission for help; but unhygienic congregation about the Mission soon eliminated natural greens and roots; and there was no immediate compensation.
It set up and appalling problem in humanity that has been understood by very few people.”
― Arthur Groom, I Saw a Strange Land

“Aboriginal peoples, like the ancients, were not so concerned with the science of matter, but rather with the science of the mind. For to them, the universe was mind, and all that existed as physical reality was the product of mind and spirit. Everything physical and material was in essence, manifested thought.”
― Kenneth Meadows, Earth Medicine: Revealing Hidden Teachings of the Native American Medicine Wheel

“As a further insult by the white invaders, an act of goodwill in the form of an annual distribution of blankets to the Aboriginal people occurred on Queen Victoria's birthday. The Illustrated Melbourne Post of 20 August 1861, page 9, described this event as, ‘a sorry return for millions of acres of fertile land of which we have deprived them. But they are grateful for small things and the scanty supply of food and raiment doled out to this miserable remnant of a once numerous people, is received by them with the most lively gratitudeâ€�.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“And they were given the most refreshing, and what was to become the most popular
drink, billy tea, black or with powdered milk and liberally sweetened with white sugar.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“Molly and Gracie sat silently on the horse, tears streaming down their cheeks as Constable Riggs turned the big bay stallion and led the way back to the depot. A high pitched wail broke out. The cries of agonised mothers and the women, and the deep sobs of grandfathers, uncles and cousins filled the air. Molly and Gracie looked back just once before they disappeared through the river gums. Behind them, those remaining in the camp found strong sharp objects and gashed themselves and inflicted wounds to their heads and bodies as an expression of their sorrow.

The two frightened and miserable girls began to cry, silently at first, then uncontrollably; their grief made worse by the lamentations of their loved ones and the visions of them sitting on the ground in their camp letting their tears mix with the red blood that flowed from the cuts on their heads. This reaction to their children's abduction showed that the family were now in mourning. They were grieving for their abducted children and their relief would come only when the tears ceased to fall, and that will be a long time yet.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“But what none of these girls realised was that their fate had already been decided by their new guardians, the Commissioners of the Native Affairs Department. Sadly, in only a couple of weeks from then, Nora and Eva would find that instead of returning north as they hoped, they would be sent further south to work as domestics on dairy farms. This would also be their introduction to exploitation and deception; a hard step along the path of life that would have so many twists and turns. As for returning home to their loved ones, well, that would not happen for many, many years.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“But you'd better make your beds first," she said. This was easy, you just straightened the blanket over the mattress. There were no sheets on the beds. They were stored away to be issued only on special occasions to impress special visitors.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“The "boob" was a place of detention once described as a small, detached concrete room with a sandy floor, with only a gleam of light and little ventilation coming through a narrow, barred opening in the north wall. Every inmate of the settlement dreaded being incarcerated in this place. Some children were forced to spend up to fourteen days in that horrible place.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“You girls can't talk blackfulla language here, you know," came a warning from the other side of the dorm. "You gotta forget it and talk English all the time.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“After roll call and lights out, Molly listened to the slide of the bolt and the rattle of the padlock, then silence. It was at that moment this free-spirited girl knew that she and her sisters must escape from this place.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“We gunna walk alongside it all the way to Jigalong," Molly said confidently. It would stand out like a beacon that would lead them out of the rugged wilderness, across a strange country to their homeland.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“Only twelve months before this, Mr A.J. Keeling, the Superintendent at the Government Depot at Jigalong, wrote in his report that, "these children lean more towards the black than white and on second thoughts, think nothing would be gained in removing them". (Department of Native Affairs file no. 173/30.) Someone read it. No one responded.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“... the government had spent more than four times the amount on lawyers [fighting a First Nations family's request for medical treatment] than would have been required to actually do the surgery.”
― Charlie Angus, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream

“It was further revealed that the government sometimes refuses to pay for certain medications even after a pediatrician has declared their necessity.”
― Charlie Angus, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream

“[The federal government memo documents] imply a feeling of bureaucratic effrontery as though this child, who hovered between life and death, was some kind of chiseller to the taxpayer.”
― Charlie Angus, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream

“But far too many innocent youngsters have been needlessly ground up in a bureaucratic meat grinder. There isn't anything accidental about such a waste of potential and life.”
― Charlie Angus, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream

“In the fight among politicians, the children lost again.”
― Charlie Angus, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream

“Right-wing pundits continually framed First Nations issues as a drain on taxpayers when, in fact, Indigenous communities were presenting a major growth opportunity.”
― Charlie Angus, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream

“This terrible legacy of colonization and genocide and inherited trauma has devalued us even to ourselves, destroyed our communities. Sometimes I think beyond saving . . .”
― Philip Elliott, Nobody Move

“Thousands of years of wandering stripped the Central Australian aboriginal of independent ability toplan a future, and made him master only of the moment. His dwellings always have been temporary crude things of sticks and leaves and grass, built in a few hours and abandoned at the mystic call of far-away food, water, or tribal ceremony. He gorged himself today, starved tomorrow, and shared his temporary possessions. He believed in his descent from spirit and dream forms of totemic ancestors in an amazingly intricate and ceremonial network, which still baffles many of the world’s foremost anthropologists. A curiously talented race, with the minds of designing mathematicians yet little ability to count; whose great strength and past lay back in the ages of legend and ceremony; whose future was never their own concern, but the pawn of circumstance; a people who could not think ahead, but feverishly worshipped the traditions of the past.”
― Arthur Groom, I Saw a Strange Land

“For ages the Aborigines had relied heavily on isolation. It was their asset and their liability, and gave them long-term control of the continent. But if their isolation were to end, as it ultimately had to end with a shrinking world, their whole way of life could be fractured. Even the arrival of a few thousand permanent settlers, whether from Europe or Asia, would be like the first tremors of an earthquake.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, The Story of Australia's People Volume 2: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia