Review of ‘The Life and Death of Anna Mae Aquash’

From ‘Akwesasne Notes’, Late Spring 1978

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ANNA MAE AQUASH, by Johanna Brand, Published by James Lorimer & Co., paperback.

In February, 1976, the body of a young Indian woman was found following an unseasonal thaw. It was found on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, crumpled at the bottom of a cliff near a remote stretch of highway.

The body was not immediately identified. A pathologist investigating the case conducted a cursory examination, filed a report that the victim had died of exposure, and cut off the hands to be forwarded to Washington for possible identification. The body was turned over to local authorities, and then interred in an unmarked grave following a short Catholic burial ceremony.

Shortly after that, the body was identified as that of Anna Mae Aquash, an alleged former paramour of Dennis Banks, a federal fugitive, and one of the best-known women in the American Indian Movement. With the discovery, and the further discovery upon exhumation that she had in fact been murdered, shot through the head with a .32 caliber weapon, there arose a number of questions.

Who killed Anna Mae Aquash? And why? And how could it have been possible that the body was not identified when she was a federal fugitive and FBI agents had allegedly viewed the body, including an agent, David Price, who had arrested Anna Mae and interrogated her? How could a pathologist have failed to notice the blood on the back of the dead woman’s head, and why had he, in a totally unusual procedure, cut off her hands (in extreme cases, they usually only sever the fingertips)?

The story of the murder of Anna Mae Aquash is not, in truth, the story of a murder. It is a long and complex story — a story which must include the history of the systematic persecution of the American Indian Movement by the FBI and other U.S. government agencies.

Anna Mae was a victim very much like Fred Hampton or Mark Clark, the Black Panther Party members who were killed by police and about whose deaths all evidence points to police assassination. Her story begins in poverty at her birthplace in Canada and continues through the periods of her tragic life which led to involvement in the occupation at Wounded Knee in 1973 and then as an activist at the center of the Movement.

And central to her story is the history of the penetration of AIM by agent provocateur Douglass Durham and the methods which he used to discredit AIM among sympathetic supporters and his actions which led to incredible paranoia within the Movement. (Durham had risen to the position of chief of security of the American Indian Movement. He was later proven to be an FBI operative with possible CIA connections.)

Brand follows the story well, and in fact, her book may be the most comprehensive history of the federal government and the FBI’s reign of terror directed against the American Indian Movement yet committed to print. She is able to see Anna Mae as a victim of an incredible secret police operation directed by the Pentagon and the FBI to harass, imprison, terrorize and occasionally assassinate dissidents — even dissidents like Martin Luther King who had not broken the law in any way.

And she does a convincing job documenting the case that Anna Mae was a victim, in one way or another, of the U.S. secret police and their campaign against AIM. Some of the people who were with AIM at the time will disagree with some of the sources she uses to identify activities within the Movement. Given the history of the continuing and heroic resistance of Native people following the arrest of many of AIM’s most prominent leaders, it is hard to agree with her conclusion that the American Indian movement was totally destroyed by the government’s efforts.

But her essential thesis, that Aquash was the victim of the FBI’s covert strategy to destroy AIM, is carefully developed and solidly documented. (AKWESASNE NOTES is clearly a major source material for this book.) It is, in reality, an attempt at a history of AIM and also of the U.S. intelligence effort against Native people. It focuses on the live and death of a Micmac woman. Must reading for AIM people and supporters.

It is important reading, too, for people who are confused about the roll of U.S. police and military agencies in the struggle for Native resources that characterizes the American Indian Wars of the twentieth century. We rate the book as Highly Recommended.

Excerpt from ‘Anna Mae Pictou Aquash: Warrior and Community Organizer‘ (2022)

…In 1978, W.H. Kelly, a retired deputy commissioner of the RCMP, wrote a book review for the Ottawa Citizen of The Life and Death of Anna Mae Aquash, claiming that the author Johanna Brand was “biased for the Indians… [and] ignores the other side,” by which he meant the side of the police, FBI and RCMP.

Kelly claimed that the RCMP’s surveillance of AIM and coordination with the FBI had been “normal.”

He also justified the FBI and BIA’s handling of the Pictou Aquash case, disparaging Brand’s book as a “subjective study.”…