Behavior: A Book Ignites an Indian Uprising

Sioux critics charge that bestselling Hanta Yo is demeaning

Some two dozen Sioux Indians sat in a semicircle on a pine-shaded lawn in Lincoln, Neb. One by one the Sioux rose to denounce Hanta Yo, Ruth Beebe Hill’s bestselling book that reviewers have touted as the Indian version of Roots. Complained Ben Black Bear Sr., a steely-haired medicine man who addressed the crowd in his native Lakota: “I wouldn’t look upon the Indian people as behaving like pte [buffalo].”

Neither would Hill, 66, who spent 30 years studying Indian culture to write her “documented novel” on the life of the Lakota Sioux in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Published a year ago to rave reviews, the 834-page novel stayed on the bestseller lists for 28 weeks and sold more than 125,000 hard-cover copies. Producer David Wolper bought television rights and is preparing a miniseries. But now Indians have launched a campaign to discredit Hill and her book and to kill the TV project.

Seven Sioux reservation councils recently passed resolutions condemning the book. Pickets follow the author around the country with signs saying HILL HAS A TONTO COMPLEX and HILL SPEAK WITH FORKED TONGUE. When Sioux protesters showed up to confront Hill at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln last week, the author angrily canceled her appearance. Said Hill: “We’ve been shafted by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Tribal councils are upset by passages referring to sexual practices, including homosexuality, oral sex as part of the marriage ceremony, the sodomizing of war prisoners and a brief mention of a woman who delivered a child and then ate some of the afterbirth. For the straitlaced Sioux, these references are a bit much. “The Lakota, next to the Cheyenne, were one of the most sexually restrained native societies that have been documented,” says Sioux Anthropologist Bea Medicine. Adds JoAllyn Archambault, a Lakota Sioux studying for her Ph.D. in anthropology at Berkeley: “No one’s objecting to what did happen—we tortured, we ate dogs. What we’re objecting to is what didn’t happen.”

Most students of Indian history agree that Hill is right about the male homosexual (winkte in Lakota) having ritual status in Sioux society. The reference to oral sex is more elusive; Hill says she got it from John Gates, a prominent Sioux leader who is now dead. The afterbirth incident. she insists, actually occurred: “Don’t tell me the placenta thing puts down Indians. It’s a beautiful ceremony symbolic of the life force.”

Outside the Indian reservations, the sexual objections count less than criticisms of Hill’s scholarship. She translates the book’s title as “Clear the Way,” and argues that it is both a war cry and a metaphysical statement of Lakota spiritualism. Among contemporary Sioux, her critics say, hanta yo is simply a throwaway phrase for dismissing an irritating child —equivalent to the English “scram.”

And many are doubtful of Hill’s claim that she translated her novel from English to archaic Lakota and then back to English to catch Sioux rhythms and emotional tone. Says Sioux Author Vine Deloria Jr. (Custer Died for Your Sins): “How in hell do you type up a manuscript in an ancient language that has never been written down and apparently has no symbols or alphabet?” Now Hill says she has been misunderstood: she did not write a complete Lakota version, but translated important concepts and phrases into Lakota, researched the root meaning of each Lakota term, then redid the English version to fit.

A more serious objection is that Hill has overstated Sioux individualism, extolling “the language of the ego” and depicting the Lakota as free from all restraints. Complains Tom Simms, a non-Indian who teaches on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota: “She takes a communal, family-oriented society and turns it into an individualistic society to the point where anyone can do anything he pleases.” Hill, a friend and ardent admirer of the radical individualist Ayn Rand, has been accused of projecting Rand’s notions onto the Sioux. One critic headlined his review of Hanta Yo, “Ayn Rand Meets Hiawatha.”

The critics have also taken aim at Hill’s Sioux collaborator, Chunksa Yuha, who spent 14 years working on the book with her in return for room, board and cigarette money. In the introduction, Chunksa Yuha writes that he was “kept out of schools and away from contact with whites until age twelve” to learn the ancient, suppressed ceremonies. But Donald Gurnoe Jr., of the Minnesota Indian Affairs Intertribal Board, says Chunksa Yuha’s real name is Lorenzo Blacksmith, the son of an Episcopal deacon, and the National Archives show that Blacksmith attended Bureau of Indian Affairs schools when he was between the ages of five and 18.

Hill’s critics seem to think that any such book should have been written by an Indian, preferably a Sioux with a Ph.D, in anthropology. Says Deloria: “Why do these non-Indians want to write about Indians? Is Hanta Yo more accurate than Black Elk Speaks?”* Hill replies coolly enough to the Anglo baiting: “These are not Indian-thinking people any more if they can’t accept Hanta Yo.”

Deloria, Gurnoe, Archambault, Medicine and others have formed an ad hoc committee to lobby against Hanta Yo. Wolper, who sees a golden television property turning to lead, has proposed setting up a Sioux advisory board. For the lobbyists, that is not enough: at week’s end they were still demanding that the TV project be killed.

* For this 1932 classic, Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux medicine man who witnessed the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, S. Dak., collaborated with white Author John G. Neihardt.