Who Killed Anna Mae?   
      
      
   By ERIC KONIGSBERG  APRIL 25, 2014    
      
         
      
   Photo    
      
       
        
   Anna Mae Aquash in the late 1960s. Credit Photograph from the Pictou-Maloney   
   family     
      
   Continue reading the main story Share This Page    
   Email   
      
      
   Share   
      
      
   Tweet   
      
      
   Pin   
      
      
   Save   
      
      
   more   
      
      
   Continue reading the main story    
      
      
       
      
      
      
   Continue reading the main story    
      
    Continue reading the main story    
      
   Recent Comments   
      
      
      
      
   Michael Waldrup   
    28 April 2014    
   This article puts Peltiers confession in as a fact which is pretty outrageous   
   and poor reporting. Anna Mae never reported it. The woman...   
      
      
      
   James Simon   
    28 April 2014    
   Good article, although it should have mentioned Arlo’s sworn testimony that,   
   as Anna Mae lay stuffed in the back of the Pinto hatchback,...   
      
      
      
   rosa   
    28 April 2014    
   The Pie Patrol.....gatekeepers. The function of a patriarchal woman in a   
   patriarchal society is to uphold the power of the patriarchal man....   
       
   See All Comments    
       
   On Feb. 24, 1976, a rancher in South Dakota was installing a fence on land   
   situated along the edge of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation when he spotted a   
   body at the bottom of a 30-foot embankment. The badly decomposed corpse, in   
   jeans and a maroon ski    
   jacket, lay with knees pushed up toward chest. A coroner later determined that   
   the woman had been dead for more than two months. The back of her head was   
   matted with blood, and there was a single bullet wound at the base of her   
   skull. She had been shot    
   at close range.   
      
   It would take investigators a week to identify the body as that of 30-year-old   
   Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a principal in the American Indian Movement. AIM was   
   the country’s most visible, and radical, advocacy group for Native American   
   civil rights. The    
   traveling band of militants had forcibly taken over the Bureau of Indian   
   Affairs headquarters in Washington to demand, among other things, the return   
   of valuable federal land to indigenous tribes. “We’re the landlord of this   
   country,” one slogan    
   went. “And the rent is due.”   
      
   AIM was founded in Minneapolis in 1968, the same year the Black Panthers —   
   the movement’s model — ambushed Oakland police officers and Cesar Chavez   
   fasted to promote nonviolence. Its leaders included Dennis Banks and Russell   
   Means, telegenic    
   spokesmen in traditional braids, buckskin fringe and cowboy boots. They would   
   publish memoirs, act in Hollywood films and address crowds on Ivy League   
   campuses. Where Means was full of bluster and indignation (Andy Warhol painted   
   his portrait), Banks was    
   soulful and charismatic. The Los Angeles Times once called them “the two   
   most famous Indians since Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.”   
      
      
   Aquash had been having an affair with Banks the year she disappeared. Although   
   he was in a common-law marriage with someone else, Aquash was convinced that   
   she was his true match. They met almost three years earlier at the siege of   
   Wounded Knee, a 10-   
   week armed standoff between residents of Pine Ridge who opposed the tribal   
   government and agents from the National Guard, the U.S. Marshals Service and   
   the F.B.I. (Wounded Knee was chosen because that was where more than 200   
   Indians were killed by the U.   
   S. Cavalry in 1890.) When she heard about the revolt there, Aquash, a Mikmaq   
   Indian from Canada, left her two young daughters with her sister in Boston and   
   traveled to join AIM volunteers who had taken up the cause. “These white   
   people think this    
   country belongs to them,” Aquash wrote in a letter to her sister at the   
   time. “The whole country changed with only a handful of raggedy-ass pilgrims   
   that came over here in the 1500s. And it can take a handful of raggedy-ass   
   Indians to do the same,    
   and I intend to be one of those raggedy-ass Indians.” On her first night in   
   South Dakota, Banks told her that newcomers were needed on kitchen duty.   
   “Mr. Banks,” she replied, “I didn’t come here to wash dishes. I came   
   here to fight.”   
      
   At the time of Aquash’s death, AIM was splintering and Banks was a fugitive.   
   Prosecutors had filed criminal charges against many of the participants at   
   Wounded Knee — by one count, more than 400 arrests and 275 indictments.   
   Banks, already facing a 15-   
   year prison sentence for unrelated charges of rioting and assault, claimed   
   that he feared for his life. William Janklow, who was running for state   
   attorney general, told a newspaper during his campaign, “The only way to   
   deal with the Indian problem in    
   South Dakota is to put a gun to AIM leaders’ heads and pull the trigger.”   
      
   Continue reading the main story    
      
   For a time, Pine Ridge’s murder rate was the highest in the nation. So   
   locals were not all that surprised when Anna Mae Aquash turned up dead: She   
   was just one more soldier lost in the fight against a government that had,   
   after all, dedicated itself    
   for centuries to the subjugation of the country’s native peoples. But over   
   the last decade, several teams of state and federal attorneys in South Dakota   
   have established that her killing was in fact an inside job, orchestrated by   
   AIM members who    
   believed she was working as an F.B.I. informer.   
      
   To Aquash’s compatriots, watching the truth seep out has been unsettling.   
   It’s easy, so many years on, to forget the tumult of the civil rights era:   
   the blood in the streets, the palace revolutions. What to do when the search   
   for answers reveals that    
   several of your own were actually the culprits? What if, in the final   
   unfolding of this morality play, the heroes turn out to have acted   
   unheroically?   
      
   “You think you want the dirty details, but you don’t,” Aquash’s friend   
   Margo Thunderbird told me recently. “The movement was the defining   
   experience in our lives, but the only thing my daughter learned about Annie   
   Mae — in an Indian school —   
    was not the principles she fought for, but how she was killed by AIM. Once, I   
   prayed at sun dance: ‘Show me who did this to her.’ Anna Mae came to me in   
   a dream and said, ‘Leave me alone, Margo.’ ”   
      
   Between 1976 and 1999, four grand juries took up the case without producing   
   any arrests. Nobody associated with AIM would talk about it under oath, and   
   the investigation remained a black hole — until, in 2000, a woman named   
   Darlene (Ka-Mook) Nichols    
   was persuaded to help.   
      
   Continue reading the main story     
        
      
      
      
   ‘Once, I prayed at sun dance: ‘‘Show me who did this to her.’’ Anna   
   Mae came to me in a dream and said, ‘‘Leave me alone, Margo.’’ ’   
      
      
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)