Annie Mae Aquash (Mi'kmaq name Naguset Eask) (March 27, 1945 – mid-December 1975) was a First Nations activist and Mi'kmaq tribal member from Nova Scotia, Canada. Aquash moved to Boston in the 1960s and joined other First Nations and Indigenous Americans focused on education, resistance, and police brutality against urban Indigenous peoples. She was a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and participated in several occupations with them. In December 1975, she was kidnapped and murdered in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation by members of AIM. Her body was later found in February 1976. In the 2000s, several members of AIM were convicted of kidnapping and murdering her.
In 1973, as part of AIM, she participated in the Wounded Knee Occupation at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Aquash had also participated in the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties and occupation of the Department of Interior headquarters in Washington, DC. In the following years, Aquash was active in protests to draw positive government action and acknowledgement of First Nations and Native American civil rights in Canada and the United States.
Aquash disappeared in late December 1975, leading to rumors that she had been assassinated. On February 24, 1976, Aquash's body was found in Wanblee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She was determined to have died from exposure by a Bureau of Indian Affairs medical examiner. But a second autopsy two weeks later concluded that she had been murdered by an execution-style gunshot to the head. Initially, her death was covered up, and the body declared to be "unidentifiable." Aquash was thirty years old at the time of her murder and had two young daughters, Debbie and Denise.
After decades of investigation and the hearing of testimony by three federal grand juries, 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. Thelma Rios was indicted along with John Graham, but she pleaded guilty to charges as an accessory to the kidnapping. In 2008 Vine Richard "Dick" Marshall was charged with aiding the murder, but was acquitted of providing the gun. Numerous Aquash supporters and her daughters believe that higher-level AIM officials, including Leonard Peltier, ordered her murder, fearing she was an FBI informant.
Early life and education Annie Mae Pictou was born on March 27, 1945 into the Mi'kmaq First Nation at Indian Brook Reserve in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia. Her mother was Mary Ellen Pictou and her father Francis Thomas Levi. She had two older sisters, Mary and Becky Pictou, and a younger brother Francis. In early childhood they lived in the wilderness in a wigwam. When the children were abandoned there, rescuers took them to the reservation for care.Vow of Silence: The Assassination of Annie Mae, episode 1 Pictou and her siblings received their early educations on the reserve but struggled with poverty throughout their early lives. At the age of eight, Pictou had tuberculosis in the eyes and lungs.
Marriage and family In 1962, Pictou was 17 years old when she moved with James Maloney from the reserve to Boston. They had two daughters together, Denise, born in June 1964, and Debbie, born in September 1965. They married that year. They divorced in mid-1970 after Pictou found Maloney was having an affair.
Pictou later married Nogeeshik Aquash, an Ojibwa activist, in a Native ceremony on April 12, 1973. She kept his last name after they separated.
Activism In Boston, Pictou began to meet urban American Indians and other First Nations people from Canada. About 1968–1969, she met members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), founded in Minneapolis in 1968. They were organizing among urban Indians, initially to combat police discrimination and brutality against their people. Pictou became involved in the Teaching and Research in Bicultural Education School Project (TRIBES), a program in Bar Harbor, Maine to teach young American Indians about their history.
On Thanksgiving Day 1970, AIM activists in Boston held a major protest against the Mayflower II celebration at the harbor by boarding and seizing the ship. Pictou helped create the Boston Indian Council (now the North American Indian Center of Boston), to work to improve conditions for Indians in the city.
In 1972, Pictou participated in the Trail of Broken Treaties march of American Indian activists to Washington, D.C. Protesters occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs national headquarters and presented a list of 20 demands to the government, 12 of them dealing with treaty issues. In Boston, Pictou met Nogeeshik Aquash, from Walpole Island, Canada, and they began a relationship.
In 1973, Nogeeshik and Anna Mae traveled together to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to join AIM activists and Oglala Lakota in resistance to internal issues. Federal law enforcement became involved in what developed as the activists' 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee, which ended on May 8, 1973.
The couple were married there in a Native ceremony by Wallace Black Elk, a Lakota elder. Anna Mae took Aquash as her surname, and she kept it after they later separated.Voices from Wounded Knee, 1973, In the Words of the Participants, Rooseveltown, NY: Akwesasne Notes, 1974
Using the surname Aquash, in 1974 Annie Mae was based mostly in Minneapolis. She worked on the Red Schoolhouse project, for a culturally based school for the numerous American Indian students who lived in the city.
That year she also participated in the armed occupation at Anicinabe Park in Kenora, Ontario by Ojibwe activists and AIM supporters. They were protesting treatment of the Ojibwe in Kenora and northwestern Ontario in relation to health, police harassment, education and other issues, and failures by the national government's Office of Indian Affairs to improve conditions.James Burke, "The Occupation of Anicinabe Park 1974; Two Interviews: Lyle Ironstand and Louis Cameron", Paper Tomahawks: From Red Tape to Red Power, Queenston House Publishing, 1976; reprinted from Oh-Toh-Kin, Volume 1 Number 1, Winter/Spring 1992, accessed July 18, 2011 Aquash also continued to work for the Elders and Lakota People of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
In January 1975, Aquash worked with the Menominee Warriors Society in the month-long armed occupation of the Alexian Brothers Novitiate at Gresham, Wisconsin.Johanna Brand, The Life and Death of Anna Mae Aquash, Toronto: James Lorimer (1993), pp. 104–105, accessed July 18, 2011 The Catholic abbey had been closed and abandoned, and the Menominee wanted the property returned to the tribe, as the land had originally been appropriated by the Alexian Brothers for their mission. That year, Aquash was arrested twice on federal weapons-related charges, but was quickly released. Her second release was shortly before she was assassinated.
Aquash's releases from jail heightened internal AIM suspicions, created by a disinformation campaign, that Aquash might be a government informant.Robert Weller, "AQUASH MURDER CASE: AIM leaders point fingers at each other" , AP, at News From Indian Country, November 4, 1999, accessed July 17, 2011 Leaders were nervous since they had discovered on March 12, 1975, that Douglas Durham, a prominent member who by then had been appointed as head of security for AIM, was an FBI informant. Durham had gained the trust of leaders in AIM over the two years he went undetected. He created his false appearance by, "dyeing his hair black, wearing contact lenses and adopting the AIM-style dress - ribbon shirts, turquoise and silver jewellery and beadwork." Aquash had suspected and denounced Durham. The officials expelled him from AIM in March 1975 at a public press conference.
According to biographer Johanna Brand, by the spring of 1975, Aquash was "recognized and respected as an organizer in her own right and was taking an increasing role in the decision-making of AIM policies and programs." She was close to AIM leaders Leonard Peltier and Dennis Banks. She and Banks had developed an intimate relationship beginning in the summer of 1974, although he was in a common-law marriage with another woman.Deborah Kades, "Native Hero", Wisconsin Academy Review 2005, accessed June 9, 2011Johanna Brand, Life and Death of Aquash, pp. 104–105
When Banks went into hiding, Aquash and Darlene (Ka-Mook) Nichols joined him at various times in late 1975 as he, along with Peltier and others, moved throughout the West for several months in an R.V. lent by actor Marlon Brando, an AIM sympathizer. According to Ka-Mook Nichols, while camping in Washington in October 1975, Peltier bragged to her, Annie Mae and others about shooting the two FBI agents on June 26, 1975.Aquash Murder Case Timeline by Paul DeMain, jfamr.org
On November 14, 1975, while they were heading south through Oregon, a state trooper pulled over the R.V., full of guns and explosives, and ordered everybody out. Peltier and Banks escaped, but Kenny Loud Hawk, Russ Redner, Aquash, and others were taken to jail.Eric Konigsberg: Who Killed Anna Mae?, nytimes.com, April 25, 2014Letter written by Annie Mae Pictou-Aquash from a jail cell in Vancouver, WA, November, 1975, anniemaeletter.blogspot.com
After having spent ten days in jail, Annie Mae Aquash was released on bail in Pierre, South Dakota on November 24. A couple of days later, she went to stay at the home of Troy Lynn Yellow Wood-Williams in Denver, Colorado. After having been seen in Denver and Rapid City, South Dakota for the last time on December 11, she disappeared in mid-December 1975.
Murder On February 24, 1976, rancher Roger Amiotte found Aquash's body by the side of State Road 73 in the northeast corner of the reservation, about from Wanblee, South Dakota. Her remains were revealed when snow melted in February."Testimony of Roger Amiotte in the Trial of Arlo Looking Cloud, February, 2004" , Justice for Anna Mae and Ray An autopsy was conducted by medical practitioner W. O. Brown, on behalf of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which had jurisdiction in the case. He wrote: "it appears she had been dead for about 10 days," and she had "died from frost." Failing to notice a bullet wound at the base of her skull, Brown concluded that "she had died of exposure." Under FBI orders, according to In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Aquash's hands were cut off and sent for fingerprinting to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.Impressions of Anna's fingers (FBI Report, March 10, 1976), jfamr.org, June 16, 2004 Since Aquash was not officially identified at the time, her body was buried in South Dakota as a "Jane Doe".
On March 10, 1976, eight days after the burial, Aquash's remains were exhumed due to requests made by the American Indian Movement and her family. AIM arranged for a second autopsy to be conducted by Dr. Gary Peterson, a pathologist from Minneapolis. He found that she had been shot by a .32 caliber bullet on the left side at the back of her head, under the hairline, in a shot that traveled upwards, missing the brain and lodging in her left eye socket. It was described as execution-style murder."Aquash murder gets new grand jury hearing ", AP, News From Indian Country, January 24, 2003
She was reinterred in Oglala Lakota land. Rumors persisted that she had been killed by AIM as an informant; the federal prosecution of activist Leonard Peltier was underway for the 1975 shooting deaths of two FBI agents at Pine Ridge. Peter Matthiessen's history, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, details the planting of disinformation about Aquash by a CIA informant years before her murder.