White camp
After True Son is taken from the place he grew up, he is taken into a white camp by the soldiers who retrieved him. The sight of the White Camp makes True Son cry and want to return to the place where he grew up even more. The way the White Camp is described through True Son’s eyes explains why he feels such adversity towards the whites and their customs and way of life. The white camp is the complete opposite of the rural and natural place where he grew up with the Indians and the technical modern place, with its smells and strange sights scare True Son and make him wish he could return to nature.
Goodbye
After Dell began the journey back to the white dominated land, he thinks back to the way the Indians live and how they reacted when they went to retrieve the white captives. Initially, the soldiers believed that they will be unable to retrieve any white captives and thought that they will be attacked by the Indians. What they found instead were tribes of Indians who accepted their white captives into their tribes and even considered them as being family. Dell describes the moments when the Indian families had to say goodbye to their adopted relatives as being something tragic, with Indians crying after their white family members and giving them gifts. This image is the complete opposite of what the white soldiers expected to find and it changed their perspective and the ideas they had about the Indian people.
Newborns
In the night when Half Arrow, True Son and Little Crane talk about the white people, they imagine whites as being children, a new nation born from the blood of many other great nations. Because they are children, they are unable to behave like the Indians and focus instead on gathering money and goods that they keep locked in barns. For the Indians, this is something foolish and meaningless since it does not promote peace but rather divides the people and makes them focus only on themselves. Because of this, white people are imagined as being inferior to Indians and as distancing themselves from the natural state man were supposed to live in.
Free land
In the first chapter, the narrator describes in great detail the hills and woods of Tuscarawas, creating the impression that the places described are the most pure places on earth. Everyone is free and they lack the restrictions imposed by the whites in their society. The way the hills and woods are described accentuates further the idea that the land dominated by Indian is free while the white-dominated land is more constrictive and more corrupt.
Bed of leaves
After finding out that Half Arrow followed him, True Son is worried about where his cousin will sleep. Half Arrow however assures his cousin that he will make for himself a bed of leaves and that everything he needs is already there, in nature, waiting for him. The bed of leaves described here enforces the idea that everything someone needs can be found in nature. Everything else is unnecessary and useless and just undesired restrictions.
