the Separatism primer: the colonial precedent — the gift that poisons
everyone’d been sort of queasily intrigued by the way the English Commander Amherst had handled the Hurons by dispensing free blankets and buckskin that had been carefully coated with smallpox variola.
Context
The one early-history detail the class can't shake prefigures the whole theme: Amherst "dispensing free blankets... carefully coated with smallpox variola" is the gift-as-weapon, experialism's ancestor — a "free" transfer engineered to poison the recipient. The Convexity's toxic "gift" has a North American pedigree, and the students' "queasy" fascination is the same flinch Hal has at the modern insurgency.