Racial conflict, consciousness of race, and pride in one's color — all give focus to these two chapters. Conflict is presented early in the discussion of the relationship of the Delawares to the French and to the Six Nations. It is objectified in the verbal fencing between the Huron Magua and the Delaware Hard Heart about prisoners and alliances and in the taunts thrown at each other by Magua and Heyward. But it reaches its climax in a revealing cry by the mixed-blooded Cora to Tamenund: "Like thee and thine, venerable chief, the curse of my ancestors has fallen heavily on their child." Cora, the strong, is aware of her background, and it is a sad weight upon her and a sore conflict within her.
Consciousness of race centers mostly in Hawkeye and Magua. When the former is handed the loaded rifle to prove his identity, he tells the Huron that he might now easily shoot him but he cannot — "because the gifts of my color forbid it." Magua makes profitable oratorical fodder of race by declaring that the Great Spirit made blacks to be slaves and whites to be traders, but those with brighter and redder skins "did He fashion to his own mind." Magua's is a temporarily successful move to win the ethnic-minded Delawares to his side.
There is also pride in what Magua says, as there is in practically all of the formal movements and speeches of the Indians in these scenes. Tribal pride is seen in the Delawares' solemn delight in being called the Lenni Lenape, a people favored by the Great Spirit. The most sovereign pride is devolved upon the representative Tamenund, whose life has spanned more than three generations of warriors and who is a venerable living legend of both tribal and racial ancestry.
Underlying these matters of race, of course, is a continuation of the technique of pursuit through a variation. Here it is mostly a verbal tug-of-war for human lives, with Magua presumptuously pursuing and threatening because of the Indians' honor and tradition concerning a captor's right to possess his captives.
