Anna Mae Pictou Aquash

Early Life

Anna (Annie) Mae Pictou Aquash was born on the Indian Brook reserve (now Sipekne’katik First Nation), a small Mi’kmaw community in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia. (See also Reserves in Nova Scotia.) Her mother, Mary Ellen Pictou, lived on welfare and worked odd jobs as a housekeeper to support Pictou Aquash, her two older sisters, Rebecca and Mary, and her younger brother Francis. Pictou Aquash’s father was Francis Levi Thomas. In 1949, their mother remarried and the family moved to the Pictou Landing reserve on Nova Scotia’s Northumberland Strait, where Pictou Aquash spent some of her childhood. In 1956, the family returned to Shubenacadie after Pictou Aquash’s step-father died from cancer.

Pictou Aquash attended schools in Pictou Landing and in Shubenacadie. Her mother abandoned the family, and Pictou Aquash soon left Nova Scotia for Maine to work seasonally as a farm labourer. Rather than return to the poverty of Indian Brook, she went to Boston with a Mi’kmaw man named Jake Maloney — joining many other Maritimers in the 1960s and 1970s who migrated to Boston in search of employment.

Community Work and Activism

In 1965, Anna Mae Pictou Aquash and Jake Maloney married. They had two daughters, Denise and Deborah, and moved back and forth between Boston and New Brunswick until their marriage dissolved a few years later. By this time, Pictou Aquash was involved in the Boston Indian Council, helping urban Indigenous people deal with addictions and unemployment. Intelligent and hard-working, she attended Boston’s Wheelock College as a mature student. She was offered a scholarship to Brandeis University, but she turned it down to care for her daughters and to continue her community work in Boston’s low-income neighbourhoods, promoting Indigenous welfare and traditional culture.

By the early 1970s, Pictou Aquash was a follower of the American Indian Movement (AIM), a protest group asserting Indigenous rights in the United States. One of the many anti-establishment movements of the time, AIM was fronted by a pair of charismatic leaders, Russell Means and Dennis Banks — described by the Los Angeles Times as the “two most famous Indians since Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.” (See also Indigenous Political Organization and Activism in Canada.)

Occupation of Wounded Knee

In 1972, Anna Mae Pictou Aquash and others in her circle in Boston participated in AIM’s Trail of Broken Treaties march on Washington DC, which culminated in AIM’s occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building. The following year, Pictou Aquash left her daughters in the care of her sister in Boston and travelled to the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, to join AIM activists who had occupied the village of Wounded Knee.

Wounded Knee is an important, historical symbol for Indigenous people in the United States, the site of an infamous massacre of the Lakota by the US Cavalry in 1890. Nearly a century later in 1973, a band of about 200 AIM members entered the Pine Ridge Reservation and occupied Wounded Knee, to protest a variety of grievances. A 10-week armed standoff ensued between the occupiers and government forces.

Pictou Aquash arrived in the midst of the siege with her boyfriend from Boston, Nogeeshik Aquash (Chippewa, from Ontario) — whom she would marry in a Lakota ceremony at Pine Ridge. Pictou Aquash refused to accept the male-dominated, hierarchical social order within AIM. Upon arriving at the Pine Ridge camp and being ordered by AIM leader Dennis Banks to help other women on kitchen duty, Pictou Aquash replied: “Mr. Banks, I didn’t come here to wash dishes. I came here to fight.”

Murder

The standoff at Wounded Knee ignited an outbreak of violence lasting several years. During the violence, two US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents were killed. Leonard Peltier, an AIM member, was subsequently convicted and imprisoned in a controversial case. This case became the subject of some high-profile books and a film.

Pictou Aquash left Pine Ridge before the occupation ended, but she continued working with AIM in projects across the United States. She became a strong but contentious figure inside the organization. She was outspoken, and not afraid to challenge AIM’s leaders, particularly about corruption in the organization. Additionally, Pictou Aquash had a romantic relationship with Dennis Banks. Years later, AIM’s critics — including Pictou Aquash’s adult daughter Denise Pictou Maloney — compared the group to criminals.

“In their world,” Pictou Maloney has said, “she was a troublemaker. These guys were gangsters, and they had a big problem with her because she knew too much information.”

Amid AIM’s internal rivalries and jealousies, and the pressure of ongoing police investigations, some suspected Pictou Aquash of being an FBI informant. According to court document, in 1975 three AIM members were ordered to kidnap Pictou Aquash. At the time, she was living in Denver, Colorado. The AIM members were instructed to bring her to Wounded Knee. According to those documents, she was raped and interrogated. In December of that year, she was killed at a lookout on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Investigation

Two months later, a rancher found Anna Mae Pictou Aquash’s decomposed body. An initial, hasty autopsy ruled the cause of death as exposure, and her remains were buried unidentified. Before the burial, however, police sent the hands from Pictou Aquash’s body to a crime lab. These were later used to identify Pictou Aquash using her fingerprints. A second, subsequent autopsy found a single bullet wound at the base of her skull.

In the years that followed, the murder case went cold. AIM members refused to co-operate with prosecutors and stated the government had killed Pictou Aquash and covered up the crime. “There was so much silence, and so much fear, people just didn’t want to talk,” Pictou Maloney said. “Indians were not willing to go and talk to the authorities, because the authorities were always portrayed as the bad guys.”

In the late 1990s, a number of old AIM members began explaining what they knew, including Arlo Looking Cloud, a former enforcer for the organization who confessed to participating in Pictou Aquash’s abduction and murder. Looking Cloud also incriminated an Indigenous man from Canada named John Graham, whom he accused of having pulled the trigger. After years of court proceedings, Graham was extradited from British Columbia in 2007 and convicted of felony murder in 2010 by a South Dakota court. Looking Cloud was initially sentenced to life imprisonment, but his sentence was reduced to 20 years. Graham has attempted to have his prison sentence transferred from South Dakota to Canada.

Denise Pictou Maloney, as well as US prosecutors, have said that Looking Cloud and Graham were simply carrying out orders handed down from others higher up in the AIM organization. Several senior AIM figures from the 1970s have died — including Theda Clark, a senior AIM organizer also suspected of participating in the murder, but never charged — while others have denied any role in the crime.

Significance

Denise Pictou Maloney has said what matters most is that the uncomfortable truth that AIM members kept hidden for years, finally emerged — that she wasn’t murdered by the government, “She was killed by her own people.” Pictou Maloney calls her mother a symbol of the violence and mistreatment Indigenous women still suffer inside their own communities, and of the code of secrecy that prevents such victims from finding justice.

“(My mother) is a testament to what we deal with today in our communities, with the level of violence and domestic abuse, and with the premise that, above all costs, you have to protect the brotherhood,” she has said. “This goes against our traditional upbringings.”

In March 2018, Pictou Maloney took that message — and her mother’s story — to a hearing of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Montreal, where she pleaded with Indigenous people to seek the truth and not be blinded by community or family allegiances.

Pictou Maloney has also condemned efforts by the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) to campaign (along with other Indigenous-rights groups) for Leonard Peltier’s release from prison. In 2016, she spoke out against AFN National Chief Perry Bellegarde, after he called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to use a meeting with US President Barack Obama to push for Peltier’s release. Pictou Maloney believes Peltier protected her mother’s killers and should remain behind bars. Bellegarde later said he regretted the pain his comments had caused Anna Mae Pictou Aquash’s family but said the AFN would continue to support Peltier. In 2024, the AFN removed its support for Peltier and his release from prison. This removal of support ended 37 years of support for Peltier by the AFN, and Pictou Maloney stated the decision was “pretty monumental.”

In 2004, Pictou Aquash’s remains were exhumed by her family and brought to Nova Scotia, where they were interred at Sipekne’katik First Nation.