Word: hanta
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
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...
...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...
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...
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...