Chapter 1 Summary

In the first line of the novel True Son has already learned he must leave the life he knows with his father, mother and sisters in the Lenni Lenape tribe and return to his white family, from whom he was taken eleven years before, in Pennsylvania. He knows the story of how he came to the tribe: He was taken to replace Cuyloga's first son, who died of an illness, and Cuyloga used a spell to transform his white blood into Indian blood. True Son considers it wrong that he should be taken from the only family he remembers and made to live with the whites, his enemy. He makes up his mind never to give up his Indian identity, no matter what happens.

True Son first tries to avoid his fate by hiding in a tree. Cuyloga finds him and drags him...