Word: sioux
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...