John Tanner and the Landscape of Life

I have been reading an essay by Ms. Erdrich in her Books and Islands (2003), entitled "John Tanner and the Landscape of Hunger", in which she states that his book was about the "relentless efforts of a man to feed himself." Is this the truth? What about feeding his adopted family, later his wife and children, and many other Indians whom he lived among? It is true, according to Tanner's book, much of the time it was feast or famine, though there must have been many times of sufficient, but not too much, as well.

Is The Narrative of the Adventures of John Tanner (1830) really the sequel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)? I think the time sequence is a little out of order. This suggestion, which Erdrich borrows from her sister, is especially misleading, if, as Wendell Berry thinks, Huckleberry Finn was trying to escape growing up. I do not get the impression that John Tanner was trying to escape growing up; he was living the life that destiny had given him, and doing it at least as well as most people do in the situations in which they find themselves. As Ortega y Gassett remarks: "Nothing so saps the profound resources of a life as finding life too easy." This is the real landscape of Tanner's life. He had developed profound resources for dealing with people and nature "in the raw", so to speak. When he came back among his white kin he was nearly stifled by the comparative ease of their lives. He needed the challenges of the Indian life to pit himself against great natural forces, and realize his potential for meeting these challenges.

The book he wrote, with the assistance of Dr. James, is a tribute to the value of such a life. Despite the flaws of the book, words and phrases rather obviously inserted by James, that a man in John Tanner's position would never use, his stunningly stubborn and unique personality come through. Like Esau, his hand may have been against every man's, and every man's against him, but he is a real man, and his care for his children, and others about him, and his participation in that culture, means that he lived, in that culture, a life successful in the only way human life can be. As Ortega y Gasset says: "Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been."

It may have been, as Erdrich quotes her sister as saying: "He vanished into his own legend." Adding for herself, "His end was as mysterious and tragic as the outline of his life in this beautiful, unforgiving country." He did one thing at least that had never yet been done, for as she states: "his is the first narrative of native life from an Ojibwe point of view."

James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone University: Think Tank & Public Policy Center
Nec ossa solum, sed etiam sanguinem.
2008