Tanner, John (c. 1780-c. 1846), author of an Indian captivity narrative, was the son of John Tanner, a preacher who moved his family to Kentucky during the first wave of Euro-American settlement in the 1780s. Young John's mother died and his father took a second wife and moved into a vacant cabin in Boone County, Kentucky, just west of Cincinnati. When he was nine years old, two Ojibwa men, Manito-o-gheezik and his son Kish-kau-ko, grabbed him as he played one spring day near his father's cornfield. They took him to Detroit and then Saginaw, where he was sold to Net-no-kwa, a female chief of the Ottawas, who adopted him as her son. From 1790 to about 1820 he lived with Ojibwa and other Indian peoples in the Great Lakes and Red River regions. He found work at Makinac in 1825 or 1826 as an interpreter before publishing an autobiography, A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (U.S. Interpreter at the Saut de Ste. Marie) During Thirty Years Residence Among the Indians in the Interior of North America (1830). The book is among the most powerful narratives of Indian captivity in U.S. literary history.

In his narrative Tanner expresses his abiding devotion to Net-no-kwa, who gave him the name Shaw-shaw-wa-be-na-se, taught him skills of hunting and spiritual life, and encouraged him in rites of passage such as killing a bear and participating in his first war party. Key events included successful hunts that enabled him to provide food for his family and others, and his membership in the Metai or Midewiwin shamanic society, through which he gained access to powerful songs and talismans. But his new mother could not protect him from the hardships of native life during the fur trade: deceitful traders, scarce game, clashes with rival tribes such as the Sioux, and bouts of drunkenness which she, and later Tanner, indulged in when able to buy liquor in exchange for pelts.

During much of his young adulthood Tanner lived with Net-no-kwa, his foster brother Wa-me-gon-a-biew, and a changing host of relatives along the Red River of the North. His perspective on events there was essentially that of an Indian, as he forgot how to speak English and appears not to have learned French fluently. He heard the revivalist message of the Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa as it spread from Prophetstown, Indiana, in 1807. The Prophet's emissary told Tanner's band that "the fire must ne'er be suffered to go out in your lodge" and that "From this time forward, we are neither to be drunk, to steal, to lie, or to go against our enemies." In 1812, when Thomas Douglas, Fifth Earl of Selkirk, arrived with a small group of Scots and Irishmen to establish a new colony on land he had purchased from the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), Tanner assisted him, and Selkirk wrote letters to the United States that enabled Tanner's birth family to learn of his fate. Tanner declined several offers by Selkirk and by Anglo fur traders to help him return to his former life. He described the Scots immigrants as "more rough and brutal in their manners than any people I had before seen. Even when they had plenty, they ate like starved dogs, and never failed to quarrel over their meat." The Selkirk colony added to tensions between the HBC and its rival in the fur trade, the North West Company. Tanner supported the HBC, but was dismayed by the violence of the conflict, which was only resolved with the merger of the two enterprises in 1821.

Tanner first married an Ojibwa woman named Mis-kwa-bun-o-kwa, then later married another Indian known as Therezia. In both unions he quarreled with his in-laws, who often threatened him with violence. Thus, he eventually decided to try to rejoin his birth family. In 1817 he reached Detroit, received assistance from territorial governor Lewis Cass, and met his long-lost brother; however, Tanner could only communicate through an interpreter. In 1819 he accepted an offer by Missouri territorial governor William Clark to assist him in traveling down the Mississippi, and Tanner eventually found his sister near Cape Girardeau. He was not comfortable, however, and longed to bring his children with him, even as his children and their mothers often resisted.

In the summer of 1827 Tanner and his second wife settled on Mackinac Island, where he worked as an interpreter for Colonel George Boyd and met Edwin James, an explorer, botanist, and medical doctor, who served as Tanner's amanuensis for his Narrative. James added an introduction and a series of appendices in which he drew upon Tanner's expertise to describe Native languages, songs, hieroglyphics, and astronomy. Tanner also assisted him in an Ojibwa translation of the New Testament. He then moved to Sault Ste. Marie and began working for Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the U.S. Indian agent and author. In 1830 Tanner met Alexis de Tocqueville and also journeyed to New York, where he had his portrait painted and sold his manuscript to the publishing house of G. C. and H. Carvill. Back in Sault Ste. Marie he became embroiled in conflicts between Schoolcraft and the Baptist missionary Abel Bingham, even as he worked as an interpreter for both men. Schoolcraft pushed through the Michigan legislature an act to remove Tanner's daughter Martha from his custody, and in 1832 Tanner's third wife and their son were also seized from him. However, Tanner continued to work for Bingham--even without pay--and continued to support the missionary enterprise; on 21 August 1831 he was baptized.

Tanner appears to have been a proud and quarrelsome man. Schoolcraft's letters and published memoirs portray him as tainted by savagery. He wrote that "Every attempt to meliorate his manners and Indian notions, has failed" and that he was "more suspicious, revengeful, and bad tempered than any Indian" (Personal Memoires of a Residence of Thirty Years with the Indian Tribes [1851] p. 601), but this account reflects Schoolcraft's own racism and self-importance as an official in the early Bureau of Indian Affairs. Tanner remained in Sault Ste. Marie and married a fourth wife, another Ojibwa woman, in 1840. In the summer of 1846 he was suspected by town residents of burning down his own house, and of murdering Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's brother James. He fled and was never seen again.

Tanner's Narrative was translated into French and German, and reprinted by Ross and Haines of Minneapolis in 1956 and in an abridged edition by Penguin in 1994. James and Tanner also collaborated on the Ojibwa New Testament, Kekitchemanitomenahn gahbemahjeinnunk Jesus Christ, otoashke wawweendummahgawin (1833). Details of Tanner's later life are found in John T. Fierst, "Return to 'Civilization': John Tanner's Troubled Years at Sault Ste. Marie," Minnesota History 50:1 (Spring 1986); and Maxine Benson, "Schoolcraft, James, and the 'White Indian,' " Michigan History 54:4 (1970).