Tribes. They’re a powerful curse laid on you when you get born (From Coover’s Huck Out West)

“Palling around with injuns, Huck, is right down dangersome. You can’t trust ’em. Remember what happened to them poor emigrants we met when we first come out here. You’ll get your throat slit before you know it. And it ain’t right. There’s a war on.”“We made the war, not them,” I says, recollecting what Dan Harper said. “We been bullying in and taking away everything they s’posed was their’n. They’re only just defending theirselves.”

“Well, from where they set, Huck, they got a point. But we ain’t them. We got to stick with our own tribe, even if they ARE all lunatics. If we don’t, we’ll end up crazier’n any of them. You remember that poor preacher up in Minnysota? Even if he was maybe right, his rebel notions was turning him plumb loco, and in the end they probably got him lynched by his own congregation. These lands is become our lands, that’s the story now, and it’s only got just one ending. There ain’t nothing them hoss-tiles can do about it, nor not you nuther.”

“Tribes,” I says. “They’re a powerful curse laid on you when you get born. They ruin you, but you can’t get away from them. They’re a nightmare a body’s got to live with in the daytime.”

Dialogue between Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer from Robert Coover’s 2017 novel Huck Out West.