(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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Who Killed Anna Mae? [1]
['Eric Konigsberg']
Date: 2014-04-27
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.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/magazine/who-killed-anna-mae.html
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