Tanner, Helen Hornbeck

Secretary of the Commission on Indian Affairs of the state of Michigan.

Helen Hornbeck Tanner was a distinguished scholar of American Indian history and literature, publishing books on the Caddo and the Ojibwa as well as on early eighteenth-century Spanish Florida.

A native of Minnesota, born July 5, 1916, Helen Hornbeck Tanner grew up mainly in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She was educated at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania (1937); University of Florida, Gainesville (1948); and the University of Michigan, where she received a doctoral degree in 1961. She taught courses in Latin American history, and later in American Indian history for the University of Michigan Extension Service and occasionally at the U-M Ann Arbor campus.

Beginning in 1963, she began a career as an expert witness in cases heard by the Indian Claims Commission in Washington D.C. Probably her most significant single case was United States v. Michigan, which established Native American fishing rights in the Great Lakes based on 19th-century treaties. Tanner was the lead witness for the plaintiffs and summarized the evidence of early and continuing Native American fishing on the lakes. From 1966 to 1970 she was a member of the Michigan Commission on Indian Affairs.

Her Bibliography of the Ojibwa (1974) was one of the early publications of the Center for American Indian History at The Newberry Library. She also prepared maps of Indian locations for the Atlas of Early American History (1976), and consulted for the Smith Center for the History of Cartography in 1974. In 1976, she joined the Newberry staff as director of the project that produced the Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (1987). She remained as a Research Associate, and in 1996 she became a Senior Research Fellow.

She died June 15, 2011.