Anna Mae Aquash

Anna Mae Aquash (born March 27, 1945, near Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, Canada—found dead February 24, 1976, northeast border of Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, U.S.) was a Canadian-born Mi’kmaq Indian activist noted for her mysterious death by homicide shortly after her participation in a protest at Wounded Knee.

Aquash was raised in poverty and, as a child, attended off-reservation schools. She dropped out of high school after her freshman year and worked picking berries and digging potatoes in Maine. At age 17 she and fellow Mi’kmaq Jake Maloney moved to Boston, where they joined a community of Mi’kmaqs who had resettled there. Aquash bore a child in 1964 and another in 1965, and she and Maloney married later in New Brunswick, Canada, though by 1968 they were separated.

Inspired by the American civil rights movement, indigenous Americans in the 1960s began to fight for their rights as delineated in various treaties, and, as part of that effort, Aquash did volunteer work at the Boston Indian Council (now North American Indian Center of Boston). There she first became aware of the activities of the American Indian Movement (AIM), though she did not become involved in the movement herself until a few years later.

In March 1972 Aquash participated in what was called the Trail of Broken Treaties, a cross-country protest event that ended in Washington, D.C., where a number of protestors occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in order to draw attention to Indian rights. The protest, which was initiated by AIM, ultimately failed in its mission. In April 1973 AIM organized a protest in South Dakota on the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre. The purpose of the protest was to end a corrupt administration on the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation. After 70 days, federal intervention ended the occupation. Aquash and Nogeeshik Aquash (whom she married in 1973) were instrumental in supplying food and other goods to the Wounded Knee protesters.

In early 1974 Aquash worked in AIM’s St. Paul, Minnesota, office. Later that year she became director of AIM’s Los Angeles office. In early 1975 a major event in which she was active occurred at an abbey in Gresham, Wisconsin, where Menominee Indians were protesting being stripped of their standing as federally recognized Indians. Those activities led to Aquash’s status within AIM reaching a national level.

In mid-1975 Aquash took part in an AIM conference in Farmington, New Mexico, to support Navajo protests regarding mining issues. Leonard Peltier, AIM’s security chief, also attended. It is believed that Peltier questioned Aquash in Farmington about her potential involvement with the FBI. From the conference, both were summoned back to the Pine Ridge Reservation to help provide security. After they arrived, an event known as the “Jumping Bull shoot-out” occurred on June 26, 1975, in which two agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and a Native American were killed during a confrontation. Peltier was convicted of the agents’ deaths. Shortly after Peltier’s arrest, Aquash’s body was found.

Before her death, Aquash and her husband had separated. She was arrested on South Dakota’s Rosebud Reservation in September 1975 on charges of, among other things, weapons possession. She jumped bail and in November was arrested in Oregon (for nine counts involving an incident in Ontario) by federal agents, who interrupted an AIM caravan traveling from the state of Washington’s Port Madison Reservation. She was sent back to South Dakota and released on personal recognizance to appear the next day for a November 25, 1975, trial. A bench warrant was issued for her arrest when she failed to appear. For three months her whereabouts were unknown. On February 24, 1976, her remains were discovered on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Facts about the death of the unidentified remains—including, for a few weeks, the presence of a bullet hole in her head—were difficult to sort out.

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The first autopsy, conducted by Pine Ridge Public Health Service, listed exposure as the cause of death. The hands of the unidentified corpse were cut off and sent to the FBI for identification. On March 3,1976, the fingerprints from the severed hands were identified by the FBI as those of Aquash. Her family obtained another autopsy, which was conducted by the same agency on March 10. That time investigators noted a .32-caliber bullet hole at the back of the skull, making clear that her death had been a homicide.

By 1994 three grand juries had been called to explore the circumstances of Aquash’s death. After many years and several trials, Arlo Looking Cloud was sentenced in 2003 to life in prison for his involvement in the murder. His sentence was reduced to 20 years in 2011, because he turned state’s evidence against John Graham (known as John Boy Patton), who in 2010 was found guilty of felony murder of Aquash. Many believe that Aquash was killed because she knew too much about certain AIM members and was considered a liability.