THE FALCON

A NARRATIVE OF THE CAPTIVITY AND ADVENTURES OF JOHN TANNER

JOHN TANNER was born on the Kentucky River near or about 1780 and captured by the Shawnee when he was nine years old. He was sold to an Ojibwa family headed by the matriarch Net-no-kwa and raised from then on by a traditional hunting-and-gathering subsistence group that ranged the north woods of Minnesota, Michigan, Ontario, and up and down the Red River. Tanner married an Indian woman in 1800, returned home to Kentucky in 1817, then rejoined his Ojibwa family the following year and for nearly three decades tried unsuccessfully to blend the Ojibwa way of life he’d learned with the ethnic identity into which he was born. He disappeared in the summer of 1846, suspected of murder. Although his name was eventually cleared, John Tanner did not show himself, so his date of death and final resting place remain unknown.

 

LOUISE ERDRICH grew up in North Dakota and is of German and Turtle Mountain Chippewa descent. She makes her home in the West. Her novels include Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, and The Crown of Columbus, the last of which was co-authored with her husband, Michael Dorris.