HANTA YO! MEANS GET OUTTA THE WAY -- NOT.

Ruth Beebe Hill

I AM NOT RUTH BEEBE HILL and I’ve never been able to read “Hanta Yo” past the first few pages without laughing.  Here’s an ASAIL review that will clue you in as to why.

https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~rnelson/asail/SAILns/34.html

Ruth Beebe Hill  (April 26, 1913 - May 28, 2015)

Ruth Beebe Hill, age 102, passed away Thursday May 28, 2015 at her home on San Juan Island, WA. Ruth Florette was born on April 26, 1913 in Cleveland Heights, OH, the daughter of Herman C. and Flora Mae (Frantz) Beebe and sister to Robert G. Beebe. On October 17, 1940, Ruth married Dr. Burroughs Reid Hill in Denver, CO and they had one son, Burroughs Reid Hill, Jr. Ruth resided on San Juan Island for over 35 years. She was a founding member and active for many years in the San Juan Islands Chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution. Ruth was actively involved with the Ayn Rand Institute, having mentored under Ayn Rand while living in California. She was world famous for her bestselling novel, Hanta Yo, published in 1979. Ruth was preceded in death by her father in 1972 and mother in 1949; brother, Robert; husband, Burroughs Reid in 1982; and son, Burroughs Reid, Jr. on November 7, 2014. 

I’ve joked that I’ve outlived all my enemies.  Not quite true, though I’ve outlived many because they were Bob Scriver’s enemies and therefore about his age.  Ruth was a year older than he was.  She had been packing the manuscript of “Hanta Yo” around with her, probably since she started kindergarten.  It was a totem, a raison d’etre, endlessly rewritten on one pretext or another -- the last one being that she was translating it into Sioux (ANCIENT Sioux, no less, with the help of a live-in example of the tribe) and then back to English.  It was hard on the clarity of the writing, to say nothing of other problems.

In the late Fifties, after Bob Scriver’s second wife, Jeanette, left for California, a family named Roberts offered to give Bob a show on their valley ranch near LA.  They admired his cowboy sculptures.  Bob had not been able to afford bronze yet, but was prepared to put effort into the hydrocal castings, which were fragile but otherwise indistinguishable from bronze.  About the same time Ruth Beebe Hill showed up and offered to present another exhibit at her house at the same time, but she wanted the Blackfeet sculptures.  (I never heard about sales.)

Ruth’s house was actually Ayn Rand’s house and had been built for Marlene Dietrich by her producer and lover, Josef von Sternberg, according to Ruth, who was there as the caretaker, a friend of Ayn’s.  It was set on wooded grounds so that huge mirrored walls and windows could be installed.  Someone else will have to follow the bisexual and exhibitionist strains from Dietrich and whether they attracted Rand and Hill.  It appears that to them marriage was to legitimate the children.  “Hanta Yo” in part raised such a hullabaloo among conservative Indians because of the inclusion of oral and anal intercourse.  One wonders.  Of course, some of the protests seemed a bit over the top.

Vigorous reviews -- part of the NA flame wars which didn’t stop until there were two suicides of admired NA writers -- meant that the book dwindled from a major screen extravaganza to a B-level TV series.  It appears from the descriptions that it was a kind of fascist romanticism -- very German in that Hiawatha way.  (“The Education of Little Tree” was written by a formally affiliated fascist, but Dietrich made a great point of her anti-Nazi stand.)  Mixing the assumed innate virtue of childlike primitives with the bourgeois conviction that wealth is a reward for superiority, there is a whole genre of these books.  They are NOT like many other books written by white people about tribal people.

In those days the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife and Studio was a regular stopover for artists, anthropologists, media people, and what the English call “Chancers.”  It’s probably atypical that there was never much drinking, but in summer there was eating out because tourists meant seasonal restaurants.  Ruth had adopted Bob as a source of reliable information about the Sioux, although what he knew was all about Blackfeet.  She assumed they were the same.  

She wanted to know between which two ribs on the side of a running bison a horseback hunter would send in his arrow.  Bob did not ridicule the idea that a man on a galloping horse was doing well to merely stay on the horse, but patiently explained that the idea was to shoot the animal in the suppootsies (guts) BELOW the ribs but angled towards lungs and heart, and then go on to the next target, leaving the first one to bleed and fall where his women could find it to begin their work on the carcass.

Ruth decided to take Bob to dinner to Wilma Franklin’s, but specified that I was not invited.  Bob and I were not married yet, but were practically Siamese twins, so we were surprised.  Unawares, I went to Wilma’s for supper and was shocked to discover the three of them.  So shocked that I failed to pay, but Wilma -- grasping the situation -- merely stopped me at the post office next day and I paid then.

Bob thought I was being small-minded until Ruth decided to throw a dinner party in the new house he had just built and asked him not to attend, since she meant it to be an intimate meal for she and her husband, plus a couple of  big shots.  Then he was more on my side.  She put his portrait of Eddie Big Beaver (“No More Buffalo”) on the dust jacket of “Hanta Yo”, but didn’t attribute it to him.  That was another bump.

Back dust jacket of "Hanta Yo"

The first summer I was in Browning, Bob’s eye was infected by Herpes Simplex Keratitis and the possibility that he might go blind was real.  Ruth’s husband, called “Buzzy”, except that she called him “Doctor Hill,” was a Ph.D. researcher at the City of Hope Cancer Research Center.  He remembered a dinner conversation about a drug that wasn’t effective on cancer, but could cure herpes.  It was still experimental and could only be accessed through the experiment.  Buzzy got Bob in and saved his eye.  

The next summer Ruth called in the debt.  She left her son, Reid, with instructions to “make him a man.”  Overweight and asthmatic, the college-aged boy went nowhere without a Coke and a cigarette.  We were building the original foundry, which was actually the old Browning Merc coal shed, and Bob expected him to do a lot of hard labor.  Reid suffered.  He probably would have been sent back for a second summer except that he and the pet bobcat took a dislike to each other.  He covertly kicked the cat and was careful to keep his bedroom door shut, but the cat knocked the screen out of his window and left a big steaming nasty calling card on his pillow.

There’s more, but I’ll skip it.  When Ruth read “Bronze Inside and Out,” she lamented,  “I don’t know what I ever did to YOU!”  Call me bobcat.

It is possible to write good novels about Native Americans without being Indian.  “Laughing Boy,” “When the Legends Die.”  The Tony Hillerman series, Paul Goble's children's books.  “Hanta Yo” was not one of them.  Normally I would say a reader should better not judge a book by its author -- but not in this case.