Anna Mae Pictou Aquash was a skilled Mi'kmaq warrior, community organizer and one of the most prominent leaders of the American Indian Movement in the 1970s. She organized with the Boston Indian Coun…
Anna Mae Pictou Aquash was a skilled Mi'kmaq warrior, community organizer and one of the most prominent leaders of the American Indian Movement in the 1970s. She organized with the Boston Indian Council, "did extensive fundraising work, created programs for the Red Schoolhouse (an American Indian Movement Survival School in St. Paul, Minnesota), and re-organized the Los Angeles AIM chapter." She took part "in many of the major Red Power actions of the 1970s, including the occupations of the Mayflower II in Boston in 1970, the BIA headquarters in Washington DC at the culmination of the Trail of Broken Treaties in 1972, Wounded Knee in 1973, Anicinabe Park in Ontario in 1974, and the Alexian Brothers’ Novitiate in Wisconsin in 1975."
Because of her effective organizing work, she was targeted for surveillance and repression by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Pine Ridge, South Dakota reservation death squad they were sponsoring, the self-proclaimed Goons (Guardians of the Oglala Nation), who killed dozens of people on the reservation. FBI infiltrators planted rumors within AIM that Aquash was an informant, but most members reported that they did not believe them. Aquash did not fit the profile, since she was neither nosy nor disruptive, she was instead an unquestionably solid organizer.
On February 24, 1976, Aquash’s body was found by a white rancher at Pine Ridge. Reservation police, Goon Squad members and FBI who showed up began a process of covering-up both her true cause of death (lying that it was exposure when she'd obviously been shot) and her identity. One of the police officers who was present, Paul Duane Herman Jr., was also a Goon Squad member and went on to murder a 15-year-old girl, Sandra Ellen Wounded Foot at Pine Ridge just a few months later.
The police buried Aquash's body before identification was confirmed by the FBI. Once the FBI callously contacted Aquash's family about the death, they requested an autopsy, disbelieving their "exposure" lie. In response, the FBI planted a story in the news shifting the blame to AIM, saying maybe AIM thought she was an informant, neglecting to mention that it was them who had intentionally planted that rumor in the first place and that AIM members tended to not believe it. Decades later a Pine Ridge cop and Goon Squad member Robert Ecoffey framed several former AIM associates for Aquash's murder, using paid and otherwise incentivized informants to lie about the case in court, shifting the blame from the FBI and their pet death squad to AIM, the organization that Aquash had been such a solid organizer for.
