In chapter XXIV of Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, the audience is presented with a slightly more intimate insight into Cooper’s understanding of Native American culture as Heyward, in a way, infiltrates a Native American camp by falsely claiming to be a medicine man. It is in this camp that we witness a father disown his executed son and tearfully exit, while Cooper notes that “the Indians, who believe in the hereditary transmission of virtues and defects in character, suffered him to depart in silence.” (Cooper, 280)

This claim is presented as though it is a belief unique to Native Americans, or, at the very least, unique to the Hurons. But much of the novel is dependent on the fact that the central (white) characters also hold to that logic. Perhaps less in terms of personal missteps and sins, although white Christianity has its own history with that concept, but certainly when it comes to the nature of someone’s parents making them more or lesser. Hawkeye holds himself up as a “man without a cross” because the “purity” of his breeding is important to his strength of character: to add color to his blood would be to change him. European racism both in and outside of the book is built on the bones of believing that non-white races are inherently defective and that they are separate from white people on a deeply biological level. The scientific influence of phrenology in the early half of the 19th century speaks to the idea’s popularity. Cooper’s own racist depictions of Native Americans falls in line with that thinking perfectly.

The notion of the father’s sins reflecting in the child are dissociated from the common white American/European idea of inherent racial qualities. The “hereditary transmission of virtues and defects” stands separate and becomes a Native American creation.