But they also find unexpected kindness from a family in a shantytown, ghettoized Jews, a boardinghouse owner who offers room and food to anyone, and a faith healer who offers them a temporary home. Along the way, they are held captive by a mad farmer who treats them as quasi family and indentured servants, visit homeless camps and meet train-hopping hobos. Newspaper accounts maintain that Emmy was kidnapped and law enforcement officers up and down the river are on the lookout for them, as are the cruel owners of the school.Įxcept for the naive Emmy, the children have learned not to trust adults and, for the most part, that is reinforced on the trip. But the trip is fraught with peril - from the rivers themselves and from the law. There, the brothers hope their Aunt Julia, whom they have only seen a few times, will take them all in. They plan to eventually make their way onto the Mississippi River with their final goal being St. Emmy’s mother and an ethical janitor are the only adults at the school who are kind to all the children.įed up with the abuse and trying to escape the aftermath of a fatal incident, the four set out on the canoe on the Gilead River that will connect to the Minnesota River. Their closest friends are Mose, a teenage Sioux whose tongue was cut off when he was a child, and Emmy, a bright little girl whose mother is a teacher at the school. The brothers stand out as the only white children among the Native Americans at the school where Odie is the rebel while Albert tries to go by the rules. “This Tender Land” opens in 1932 when narrator Odysseus “Odie” O’Banion and his brother Albert endure a constant barrage of brutal treatment at the Lincoln Indian Training School in Minnesota where they were sent after their bootlegger father was murdered.
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