Anna Mae

A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY (Summary from Wikipedia entries relating to the various protagonists):



1945
Anna Mae was born on March 27, into the Mi'kmaq First Nation at Indian Brook Reserve in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia.
1962
Moves with James Maloney from the reserve to Boston
1964
Birth of her first daughter, Denise
1965
Birth of her second daughter, Debbie, and marriage with James Maloney
1969
Meets members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and gets involved in the Teaching and Research in Bicultural Education School Project (TRIBES)
1970
Divorce. Helps creating the Boston Indian Council to work to improve conditions for Indians in the city
1972
Participates in the Trail of Broken Treaties march of American Indian activists to Washington, D.C. Meets Nogeeshik Aquash, from Walpole Island, Canada.
1973
The two travel to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to join AIM activists and Oglala Lakota in resistance to internal issues, which developed as the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee. On arrival, she has anyhow to counter a task attribution by Dennis Banks, one of the AIM leaders, : "I didn't come here to wash dishes, I came her to fight". Marriage there with Aquash, during the occupation.
1974
Based in Minneapolis, she works on the Red Schoolhouse project. Participates in the armed occupation at Anicinabe Park in Kenora, Ontario by Ojibwe activists and AIM supporters. She ontinues her work for the Elders and Lakota People of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. She gets closer to AIM leaders Leonard Peltier and Dennis Banks. She begins an affair with Banks.

1975
JANUARY:
She works with the Menominee Warriors Society in the month-long armed occupation of the Alexian Brothers Novitiate at Gresham, Wisconsin
Somewhere in early 1975, Banks put an end to their affair to remain with his common-law wife Darlene Nichols
MARCH:
She helps unmask an FBI informant within the AIM executives; he is expelled on a press conference
SPRING:
She is taking an increasing role in the decision-making of AIM policies and programs.
Arrested on federal weapons-related charges, she receives the visit of agent Price who tries to recruit her. As she refuses, he says she has to expect not survive over a year. Rapidly released she is confronted with rumors and accusations of being an informant, what she denies.
JUNE:
At the AIM convention in Farmington, she meets friend and "chairman" (or spokesman as he defines himself) John Trudell and entrust him her concerns and anger.
In the PINE RIDGE SHOOTOUT, two FBI agents are killed on the 26. The FBI suspects Peltier and believes Aquash was a witness.
SUMMER:
Banks, Peltier and others go on hiding, traveling through the West in an R.V. lent by Marlon Brando, an AIM sympathizer. Anna Mae and Darlene Nichols, friend of Aquash, visit them from time to time.
SEPTEMBER:
Two other suspects in the shootout of June, Butler and Robideau, are arrested.
Aquash receives the visit of FBI agent Price who tries to pull informations out of her. As she refuses, he says she has to expect not survive over a year.
On a stop over in LA, she meets Trudell again and entrust still being under accusations, expresses her fears, before heading over to Denver
OCTOBER:
During one of the visits by Aquash and Nichols to the R:V., Peltier braggs to them and others about shooting the two FBI agents in June.
NOVEMBER 14:
During another visit, a state trooper pulls over the R.V. in Oregon, full of guns and explosives, and ordered everybody out. Peltier and Banks escaped, but Aquash and others were taken to jail.
NOVEMBER 25:
After having spent ten days in jail, Annie Mae Aquash is released on bail in South Dakota, prior to the others. According to Nichols, they were first jailed together and Aquash entrusted her, she feared for her life.
A few days later she is at the home of AIM members in Denver.
END OF NOVEMBER or BEGINNING OF DECEMBER:
She sends her ring and a letter to Trudell, a signal she needs to communicate with him.
DECEMBER 11: She is seen for the last time in Rapid City, South Dakota.
DECEMBER 22: Peltier is named to the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
DECEMBER 25: Daughters and relatives remaining without the traditional Christmas phone call become alarmed.

By the end of the year 1975, rumours are circulating Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash has been assassinated.

1976
FEBRUARY 6:
Peltier is arrested in Hinton, Alberta, Canada.
FEBRUARY 24:
Revealed when the snow melted, a body is discovered at the northeast corner of the Pine Ridge Reservation.
On behalf of the Bureau of Indian Affairs a quick autopsy will conclude to a death from frost, missing somehow the bullet in Aquash’s head.
MARCH 2:
Since not identified at the time, the feminine remains are buried as "Jane Doe".
As he would later testify in court, Trudell learns from Banks that a body was found and that he believes it might be Aquash.
MARCH 10:
The unidentified remains are exhumed due to requests made by the AIM and Aquash's family. AIM arranged for a second autopsy to be conducted by a pathologist from Minneapolis. He found that she had been shot at the back of her head. It was described as execution-style murder. It appears also that she had been beaten severely in the face with many of her teeth missing and he hands have been cut off, reportedly ordered by the FBI to be sent to Washington.
SPRING
She was reinterred in Oglala Lakota land. Rumors persisted that she had been killed by AIM as an informant.

LEGAL AFTERMATH
After decades of investigation and the hearing of testimony by three federal grand juries in 1976, 1982 and 1994, finally, in March 2003, AIM members Arlo Looking Cloud and John Graham were indicted for the murder of Aquash. Looking Cloud was convicted in 2004 and Graham in 2010; both received life sentences. […] It was later revealed that most of this campaign to discredit her can be traced to Douglass Durham, an FBI informant. She was intentionally bad-jacketed in order to force her to collaborate.

After the conviction of Looking Cloud in 2004, Aquash's family had her remains exhumed. They were transported to her homeland of Nova Scotia for reinterment on June 21 at Indian Brook Reserve in Shubenacadie. They held appropriate Mi'kmaq ceremonies and celebrated the work and life of the activist.

As it appeared in the trails, Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash was looking for a safe place at the home of Troy Lynn Yellow Wood in Denver, Colorado, by the end of November 1975. But a delegation of mostly women showed up in early December and she was then "transported" by AIM members Arlo Looking Cloud, John Graham and Theda Nelson Clarke to Rapid City, South Dakota, on December 10, 1975, to be questioned. The house was of Thelma Rios, a Lakota advocate in Rapid City. It was alleged that Graham, Looking Cloud, and Theda Nelson Clarke had taken Aquash to Marshall's house, where they held her, then took her to be executed in a far corner of the reservation. Marshall, a bodyguard for Russell Means at the time of Aquash's murder, is alleged to have provided the murder weapon to Graham and Looking Cloud. He was acquitted of the charge of conspiracy to murder Aquash. Theda Clarke was not indicted; by then, she was in failing health. In September 2009, along with Graham, Thelma Rios was charged by the State Court of South Dakota with the kidnapping, rape and murder of Aquash. Already in poor health, she avoided a trial on murder charges by agreeing to a plea bargain. Rios admitted in court that she "relayed a message from AIM leadership to other AIM members to bring Aquash from Denver to Rapid City in December 1975, because they thought she was a government informant" and that there was a discussion about "offing her". She was convicted for kidnapping and died of cancer in February 2011. In 2011, the sentence against Looking Cloud was reduced to 20 years as a reward for his testimony against his codefendant, John Graham. He was released from prison in 2020. John Graham was prosecuted for holding captive, torture, rape and murder. He was convicted of murder in the first degree for having been the gunman, and is still in jail.

Together with federal and state investigators, Aquash's daughters Denise and Debbie believe that high-ranking AIM leaders ordered the death of their mother due to fears of her being an informant; they support the continued investigation. Denise Pictou-Maloney is the executive director of the "Indigenous Women for Justice", a group she founded to support justice for her mother and other Native women. In March 2018, Denise Maloney spoke at the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women inquiry in Montreal about her mother's murder.


CONTINUED INVESTIGATIONS

In 2014, a researched article by The New York Times Magazine, worth reading to delve deeper, has brought new elements to light. It points to a context of violence by and at the expense of AIM which, combined with various lines of tension within the AIM leadership and their kin, contributed to making it a “vortex of paranoia”:

' “Different crews were ‘bad-jacketing’ each other, calling them pigs,” or collaborators with the feds, says Aquash’s friend Melvin Lee Houston. […] Aquash was a powerful figure in AIM, but also something of an outsider. […] Aquash’s friends say her affair with Banks brought particular resentment from a group of militant, mostly Sioux women who called themselves the Pie Patrol and viewed her as a threat to AIM’s stability. '

Darlene Ka-Mook Nichols, married to Dennis Banks from 1972 to 1989 and befriended with Aquash was a key-testimony in the prosecution of the case after she read a newspaper article sent by her mother in 1999: ' Nichols was struck by the number of people Aquash apparently encountered in the hours before her disappearance. “They were mostly women, and people I knew well,” she told me. '

While the trials of the 2000s succeeded in convicting the executors and made clear that Looking Cloud and Graham had not acted on their own (and moreover did not know Anna Mae), these trials touched on but did not insist on this female chain of command:

' Theda Nelson Clark, who drove [Looking Cloud and Graham], along with Aquash, from Denver to the scene of the shooting in her red Pinto […] was 50 in 1975, was a matriarch in AIM, revered but hardly beloved. […] Looking Cloud said Clark handed Graham the gun. But she was never charged. […] Another woman, a former girlfriend of Banks, admitted in court that she told Clark to ferry Aquash to South Dakota to be “dealt with” — instructions that she in turn was relaying from Thelma Rios, an AIM activist in Rapid City. While the government managed to extract a guilty plea from Rios for kidnapping — her five-year sentence was commuted, and she died of lung cancer in 2011 — she said she was passing down the order from yet two other women. She also acknowledged hearing two people say of Aquash: “The bitch should be offed.” The two names were redacted from Rios’s plea agreement but are widely believed to be those of Madonna Thunder Hawk and Lorelei DeCora. They, along with Rios and several other women, made up the Pie Patrol. […] They all had close ties to AIM’s leaders: [Dennis Banks and Russell Means …] Prosecutors zeroed in on the Pie Patrol and learned that the three women held an “interrogation” of Aquash at a house in Rapid City in the hours before she was killed. […] "But there was not enough evidence to charge Thunder Hawk or DeCora or compel them to cooperate", Oswald says. “And we still consider it extremely unlikely that anybody could pull off the murder of Dennis Banks’s girlfriend without the blessing of one of the men in charge.” '

The article concludes with an in a way eloquent talk with Dennis Banks: ' He talked about informers. “There was a lot going on that made the paranoia believable,” he said. “It became impossible to trust anybody.” […] Even so, I asked, would he have advocated killing someone who he knew for certain was a traitor to AIM? (There has never been any evidence that Aquash was an F.B.I. informer.) “I don’t know if I would participate in some sort of getting-rid-of-the-person,” he said. “But I would say, ‘Take care of this.’ Or, ‘Take the guy out, and I don’t want to see him again.’ ” '

Quoted from: Eric Konigsberg, "Who Killed Anna Mae?", The New York Times Magazine, April 25, 2014.
Who Killed Anna Mae - nytimes.com


NB: In November 2024, "Vow of Silence: The Assassination of Annie Mae", a 4-episode television series directed and produced by Yvonne Russo - a Native filmmaker who went collecting testimony among native people - has been premiered on Hulu, an American subscription streaming service owned by Disney. Might also be of interest (by now, for those who have access to Disney+)