The Ghost of Anna Mae Aquash

12.6.23

When I first visited Pine Ridge Reservation, site of the Wounded Knee massacre, it left an indelible impression on me. It was an eerily beautiful place of wind-swept plains that seemed haunted by the voices of the dead echoing from the Black Hills in the distance.

Home to the Lakota (Sioux) people, Pine Ridge was central in the 1970s to a concerted effort by Native Americans to demand their rights and reclaim their land from the U.S. government.

The American Indian Movement (AIM) emerged as the leading voice of the activists in that uprising. The occasion for my visit to Pine Ridge was the mysterious murder of AIM activist Anna Mae Aquash, a 30-year-old mother of two and member of the Mi'kmaq tribe who traveled from Nova Scotia to join the rebellion.

Aquash organized demonstrations and spoke out eloquently on behalf of native rights. She also was AIM co-founder Dennis Banks' lover at a time when AIM had been placed under FBI surveillance by President Richard Nixon.

“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.”

Violence haunted AIM and by 1975, more than 60 Indians had been killed, mostly in unsolved cases. Activists accused the U.S. government of waging a deadly war against their people. Tensions between AIM and the FBI on Pine Ridge reached a boiling point. In an armed battle with AIM members, two FBI agents were killed. 

Afterward, authorities grilled Aquash about the killings and then released her, leading her AIM colleagues to suspect she might be an informer. 

Five months later, she disappeared.

In February 1976, her badly decomposed body was discovered by a rancher working his property line; she had been killed execution-style by a single shot to the head.

For Rolling Stone, Lowell Bergman and I traveled to Pine Ridge to try and find out who was behind her murder. With investigative stories of this kind, sometimes you solve the mystery but usually you don't.

In Anna Mae's case, we discovered a lot of salient details but we did not solve the mystery. We did write a long story about the case, which may have helped raise awareness beyond South Dakota. 

Over the years, the mystery bubbled to the surface from time to time until finally (in 2004 and 2010) authorities were able to convict two low-level AIM members of her killing.

But according to a piece in the New York Times Magazine by Eric Konigsberg, these two were essentially the fall guys for the crime, which was in fact engineered by a group of AIM women known as the Pie Patrol.

Almost certainly, according to Konigsberg, higher-ups ordered the Pie Patrol to have Anna Mae murdered. If so, the guilty parties apparently went to their graves with their secret.

Dennis Banks died three years ago at age 80. 

According to Lakota legend, when the body of a murder victim is moved, a strong wind will blow. When you stand out on Pine Ridge today, you can feel that wind and hear the voices of ghosts echoing around you. 

One of those voices must be that of Anna Mae Aquash.

(I published this originally in December 2020.)

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