ABSTRACT
The United States had a major problem defining its cultural identity. It was created as a nation-state by a series of acts of will: a detailed and proclaimed Declaration of Independence, a revolution, a sustained war of independence and a ratified constitution. Political and economic institutions then grew up informed by shared ideologies of liberalism and capitalism. The novel continues to stress the possibility of intimate relations between white and Native American, continuing the friendship between Leather stocking and Chingachgook. Magawisca's father, Mononotto, had been a friend of the English but had seen his hopes for a peaceful accommodation between the two communities dashed by the Pequod War, which the novel describes from the Native American point of view. The novel highlights the question of whether whites and Native Americans could come to some mutually acceptable way forward by examining the predicaments of a marriage between a white and a Native American and of the offspring of such a union.
