Anna Mae Pictou (Aquash) ©
photo by K. McKiernan
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After 20 Years
by Candy Hamilton
News From Indian Country
© Late March, 1996
For over a year and a half, the panels have heard testimony about the murder of Anna Mae Pictou (Aquash), an American Indian Movement leader whose body was found Feb. 24, 1976, in a Badlands ravine near Wanblee, the most eastern community on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Although many federal grand juries in South Dakota have rushed to indict activist Indians on the flimsiest of evidence -- Leonard Peltier, for instance -- the grand juries considering Pictou's murder apparently want total confessions before issuing indictments.
Mary Lafford, Pictou's sister, says the current investigation has turned into still another ploy to raise hopes -- only to dash them again.
"They'll never do anything," said Mary Lafford, Anna Mae's sister, on the anniversary when her sister's body was found. She added that NO ONEinvolved with the current investigation has contacted her.
Hearing about the current grand juries has triggered many people's recollections, unofficial and amateur "investigation," and more piecing together of Pictou's last months. Unfortunately reaction to the official investigation also led to a barrage of charges and accusations from and against AIM members in the already faction-ridden movement. Letters, faxes, and phone calls fly.
For years Pictou's friends have acknowledged among themselves that only someone she knew could have gotten close enough to her to put her in a deadly situation. They also know that fears and anger about real informers planted by the FBI in AIM could surface against even dedicated activists if jealousies or antagonisms got out of hand.
"We knew Anna Mae since Wounded Knee," said Russell Loud Hawk, an elder in Oglala. "Everything was going to pieces. The traditional people didn't know who to turn to, so we asked Anna Mae and the boys to come." The boys included Dino Butler and Leonard Peltier along with three other men and women who lived in a one-room house without running water or electricity and worked with people in the community.
"She really dedicated herself to the Indians.
She was friendly and could talk to anyone.
She took a real interest in the old days,"
recalls, Russell Loud Hawk, an Oglala elder.
Information from AIM members who have looked into her death separately and independently of any official investigation indicates the murder occurred before the end of December 1975. Even people in different factions of AIM, already feuding before the current investigation began, set Pictou's murder within two weeks of her forced removal from a house in Denver (a situation long known among her friends and coworkers) and interrogation by AIM members at the Rapid City Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee offices in early December.
Among those certain of the December date death are some who accuse each other of involvement.
Gary Peterson, who conducted the second autopsy and found the bullet lodged in Pictou's left temple, said in a recent interview that the best way of figuring the date of her execution-style murder was determining reliably the last time she was seen. No "sightings" after early December have checked out as definitly reliable. One friend who for years has searched hard for answers to the mystery says she probably was dead less than two weeks after the Rapid City interrogation. That interrogation resulted from charges by some that she was an informer.
At that time, Pictou reached a friend at Pine Ridge by telephone from Rapid City and indicated that people she thought were allies were mistreating her -- but before she could say exactly where she was, the call was terminated.
Go to Page 2 by Candy Hamilton
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