The Council of Tamenund is a Delaware assembly and judicial hearing whose decisions reshape the captives’ fate and establish Uncas as the leader of a national expedition. In a public circle before the revered elder Tamenund, competing claims are tested through deliberation and demonstrated skill; the recognition of Uncas’s descent from the Turtle lineage then transforms the gathering from a tribunal into a council of war.

Assembly and proceedings

After Tamenund’s people receive him with reverence, the prisoners are brought into a dense circle before the council. Cora stands beside Alice, protecting her with an arm; Duncan Heyward remains near them, while Hawkeye takes a place slightly behind. Uncas is absent at first. An elder asks which prisoner is La Longue Carabine, and uncertainty over the name becomes the council’s first test of identity and credibility.

Hawkeye claims the name associated with his reputation, explaining that his kin called him Nathaniel, the Delawares call him Hawkeye, and the Iroquois call him the Long Rifle. To settle the dispute, the chiefs have the two apparent claimants fire at an earthen vessel. Hawkeye’s first shot seems accidental to many observers, but a second shot passes through the vessel’s opening and pierces its base. The demonstration establishes his identity before the assembly, redirecting attention from Heyward to the scout.

Magua’s appeal and the council’s judgment

Magua uses the hearing to press his own claims. Earlier, he had shaped the Hurons’ grief over their fallen warriors into a demand for revenge, arguing that a captive should be sent after the dead with burial goods. At the council he again works through public speech, presenting the pale faces as acquisitive intruders and the red people as rightful inhabitants of a land once rich in game and free of roads. His account frames the dispute as one about land, power, and the consequences of colonial expansion.

Tamenund’s judgment nevertheless follows the council’s stated commitment to justice. He orders that the stranger be given food and tells Magua to take his own people and depart. The ruling does not settle every claim peacefully: when Magua asks to leave with Cora, Tamenund acknowledges that she is unwilling but allows her to go with him, declaring that the Delawares must not act unjustly. Cora rejects the proposed marriage, and Heyward offers a ransom, but the council’s decision stands. Magua leaves with Cora while the others remain behind.

Uncas’s recognition

Uncas enters the gathering as a captive, composed despite the hostility directed toward him. When the council condemns him to a trial by fire, the discovery of a small tortoise tattooed on his chest changes the proceedings. The mark identifies his inherited connection to the Turtle lineage. Uncas names himself as the son of Chingachgook and a descendant of the great Unamis; Tamenund recognizes him as the heir who can fill his place at the council fire.

Uncas explains why his family has been absent from Delaware councils. His forebears withdrew as pale settlers spread across their former country, moving toward the river and hunting grounds where they could live apart. He describes the family’s hope of returning when the Manitou calls them back. The account makes the recognition more than a personal reprieve: it gives the Delawares a living link to an older political lineage and to lands lost through colonial settlement.

Tamenund then questions Uncas’s friendship with Hawkeye, whose reputation includes killing Delaware warriors. Uncas answers that he calls a man a friend when that man proves himself one, and insists that Hawkeye is welcome if Uncas himself is welcome. The exchange tests whether recognition of Uncas’s rank will also change the council’s treatment of his companion; it establishes their alliance as part of the new order taking shape around the young leader.

From judgment to mobilization

Once Magua has departed with Cora, Uncas turns the council’s attention toward action. A young warrior strips the bark from a small pine; others remove its branches and mark its trunk with red paint. Uncas appears with much of his clothing removed and his face darkened, then circles the post in a measured dance while singing a war song that invokes the Great Spirit and asks for aid. The song moves between reverence, alarm, and a battle cry, giving the gathering a ritual form for collective resolve.

Respected chiefs join the dance, and Uncas strikes the post with his tomahawk, publicly assuming command of the expedition. A hundred young men then destroy the symbolic tree, treating it as the enemy and thereby declaring the campaign a national war. Uncas looks to the sun as the truce with Magua ends; the assembled warriors abandon the symbolic contest and prepare to pursue the real one. The council thus closes not with reconciliation but with a decision to mobilize, while Tamenund withdraws and the women, children, and elders move toward safety.

Significance

The assembly’s decisions emerge through a sequence of public performances: claims are spoken, Hawkeye’s identity is demonstrated by a shot, Uncas’s ancestry is disclosed through a bodily emblem, and collective authority is enacted through song and ritual. These proceedings present Delaware political judgment as structured by deliberation, inherited status, friendship, and obligations of justice, even as the ruling over Cora exposes the limits of protection available to a captive under competing claims.

The council also binds recognition to loss. Uncas’s account traces his family’s absence from the council fire to the spread of settlers across their land; his newly acknowledged authority is therefore inseparable from displacement. The assembly restores him to a place in Delaware leadership, but its immediate outcome is war, and its final movement sends the nation toward conflict rather than recovering the country his ancestors left.