The Mystic Warrior

The Mystic Warrior is a 1984 American TV movie about a band of Sioux and the efforts of one man to save his people from destruction through the use of mysterious powers handed down by ancestors. The movie was originally a nine hour miniseries entitled Hanta Yo to be aired in 1980, instead aired in 1984 as a five hour mini series with the new name. The movie was never released on VHS or DVD although it has been shown on cable TV where it failed to draw viewers away from such formidable competition as The Jeffersons, Alice and One Day at a Time.

The fivehour miniseries The Mystic Warrior began life in 1979 when producer David L. Wolper announced plans for a tenhour adaptation of Hanta Yo, an epic historical novel by Ruth Beebe Hill. Using as her main source a fullblooded Sioux named Chunksa Yuha, Hill fashioned what amounted to a Native American version of Roots, chronicling the history of the fictional Matho lakota Bear tribe of the Oglala Lakota Sioux. Although Hill was briefly the darling of the literary cognoscenti, her book was ultimately attacked and discredited by a veritable army of Indian historians, teachers, and activists, who accused her of distorting and falsifying truths in order to promote her own and Yuhas sociopolitical agenda. Suddenly, all of the Native American support that had been promised to the miniseries version of Hanta Yo evaporated. When the project finally aired on Maythrough 21, 1984, its running time and budget had been cut in half, and the producer was obliged to qualify the credits by noting that the teleplay was based partially on Hills book, but mostly on other sources. Judging by the results, those sources would seem to have been such Hollywood fictional films as Cheyenne Autumn and A Man Called Horse. The filming location had to be changed from New Mexico to Thousand Oaks, California, so as not to offend the Indian tribes in the former state.

Source: Wikipedia