Point taken, but consider the context of where we are in this thread: discussing immigrants and foreign contract workers cheating in interviews and on their resumes for positions within the United States. Perhaps your point is more applicable to how the idea of high or low trust cannot apply to workers operating in a culture foreign to their own.

The example of inter tribal slavery doesn't actually apply to what I'm talking about. Slavery, and highly destructive, unprovoked raids which sometimes concluded with massacres of women and children were normal in the Americas. Is enslaving a member of another band or tribe a violation of trust? Is engaging in unprovoked war raids a violation of trust? These practices would not come as a surprise to anyone living within raiding territory of a warlike people. Trust can only come into play when a party to an agreement, whether tacit or explicit, has an opportunity to violate what was agreed upon.

Saying "Every nation ever has always tried win zero-sum interactions with other nations" conceals that there were actually vast differences in the way colonialist powers conducted themselves in relations with Native American tribes. The (at the time British) Canadian government honored treaties much more often and in better faith than US authorities.