The Wakan Circle

ANNA MAE PICTOU AQUASH

ANNA MAE AQUASH aged 24. Anna, a native of Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, had become a well-known Indian activist when she was killed execution-style in Feb. 1975. Her family says the man who pulled the trigger is living in Whitehorse, but no one has ever been charged. Aquash was shot in the back of the head in the American Midwest

Her daughter Denise made a tearful plea for Canadian pressure to finally resolve the case.

Aquash had helped AIM, the American Indian Movement, in the standoff at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973. Two years later, she was at the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation when two FBI agents were killed in a fight with members of AIM. Aquash was arrested on weapons charges, but later released by a judge. Several months later her body was found in the Dakota Badlands.

Some people said the FBI wanted her dead, but her family says she was actually kidnapped, raped and killed by members of the Indian movement because she knew too much about who killed the FBI agents. Her cousin, Robert Pictou-Branscombe, has conducted his own investigation and he has publicly named three people as the killers -- a man and woman in the United States and the man who pulled the trigger, now in Whitehorse. Now Pictou-Branscombe wants the Canadian government to use its influence to finally wrap the case up. "We want it resolved. We want prosecution," he said. br>
The RCMP say the man in Whitehorse is not under investigation. Meanwhile, the American detective who took over the case this year says he, too, is close to laying charges"

On the afternoon of February 24, 1976 Rodger Amiotte, a mixed blood rancher whose land was in the northeast corner of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation...found the body of a woman in a snow-covered ditch one hundred feet from the country road. She was wrapped in a blanket. The woman wore a maroon windbreaker, jeans, and blue canvas shoes. She had long fingernails. Her hands were adorned with fancy turquoise jewelry, including rings and a large bracelet.

The body was taken to the Pine Ridge hospital, where Dr. W.O. Brown performed an autopsy in the presence of FBI agents. The doctor said the unidentified woman died of exposure. She had frozen to death. There was no sign of violence. "

During the autopsy, an FBI agent asked Doctor Brown, "I need her hands. Sever them at the wrist, would ya, Doc?" Over the next days, the government agents approached mortuary after mortuary, asking to have the handless body buried. According to one undertaker, the FBI agents wanted the woman buried under a fictitious name. 'Can't do it,' he said. 'You guys ought to know. That's illegal.'

On March 3, the body was buried, nameless in the Holy Rosary Mission on the [Pine Ridge] reservation. That same day, the FBI notified its Rapid City office that the dead woman was Anna Mae Aquash." The Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee (WKLDOC) demanded a an exhumation and a second autopsy. However, before this could take place, "The FBI filed its own request for exhumation and reautopsy. The reasons its affidavit gave were that Anna Mae might have been killed in a hit-an-run accident or that she might have been murdered by AIM as a suspected informer...there was no explanation as to how a person who might have been a victim of a hit-and-run accident could have been thrown one hundred feet from the highway, display no sign of contact with a vehicle, and end up in a ditch, neatly wrapped in a blanket." The autopsy was scheduled for March 11, 1976.

Anna Mae's family, through WKLDOC attorney Ellison hired Garry Peterson, an independent pathologist from St. Paul Hospital in Minnesota to observe. When he arrived, Dr. Peterson was the only Doctor there. The FBI had not bothered to have a pathologist at the autopsy it had requested. Peterson, who brought only the minimal equipment needed to observe, had to perform the procedure. It was not terribly complicated.

An obvious bullet wound, surrounded by an even more obvious 5 cm x 5 cm discoloration, adorned the rear of Anna Mae's head, exactly where the hospital staff had seen the thawing body leak the week before. She died of exposure to a small-caliber bullet fired from a gun placed near the back of her head. She had been executed.
Loud Hawk - The United States versus
the American Indian Movement

ANNA MAE'S QUOTES

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