CHAPTER 13

Two Cut-off Hands

They won’t let Indians like me live. That’s alright.

I don’t want to grow up to be an old woman.

—Annie Mae Aquasb

Nobody could ever say anything bad about my friend Annie Mae, because she never did anything bad in her life. She never walked into my home, she always burst in, full of energy. She was a small woman, hardly more than five feet tall, but she dominated those around her by the force of her personality. She was pretty, too, with her wide, smiling mouth, her Indian eyes and cheekbones, her flowing black hair.

She was always the first up in the morning, making sure that everybody got fed. She saw to it that all the men had clean clothes. She often took dirty clothes to the river and washed them herself. She combed and braided all the men’s hair. Whenever she saw young girls just sitting around and gossiping, doing nothing all day but lying on a couch putting on makeup, she would tell them to get off their asses and start doing something worthwhile. She was happy to clean house, have everybody sweeping up and mopping. She was a good cook. She taught me and a lot of other women some good Indian recipes. Once she danced into my kitchen, danced around the table with a whole basket full of frogs she had caught in the river and killed. She cooked us up some frog’s legs French-Canadian style. She would do fine beadwork for you. All you had to do was ask her. She learned how to make Sioux moccasins from Leonard’s mother. She was gifted and had a flair for designing clothes, for creating very imaginative Indian fashions. She even modeled them for white customers. She was a natural-born leader. She had held responsible positions as director of Indian youth and antialcohol programs. She played a very active role within the Indian movement, both at national AIM headquarters in Minneapolis and on the West Coast. For me she was a rock to lean on, a rock with a lot of heart. She did not deserve to die.

Annie Mae was a Micmac Indian, born and raised on a tiny reservation in Nova Scotia, not far from Halifax. Though she lived in Canada, two thousand miles from Rosebud, her life was almost a copy of mine, or of that of thousands of other young Indian girls and women. Instead of on a reservation, she lived on a reserve. Instead of a Bureau of Indian Affairs regulating and interfering with her existence, it was a department. The white boss lording it over the Micmacs was an agent, not a superintendent. The men who harassed her were mounties, not state troopers. Otherwise everything was the same north of the border. She lived in the same kind of tar paper shack that I did. She too had to do without electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, running water, and paved roads. She too was often hungry, down to one meal a day, eating anything she could find. Her mother had the same name as I—Mary Ellen. All she could tell me about her father was that he was a good fiddler who one day vamoosed. Her mother then married a good, hardworking, sober-minded man, but he got sick and died. Her mother then came apart, did hardly anything but gamble and smoke, and took off to marry again, abandoning her half-grown children, leaving them to fend for themselves.

Annie Mae had two sisters and one brother. One of the sisters, Mary, was especially close to her. She told me that Mary was very much like herself. The kids helped each other, Annie Mae having to take the part of her absent mother. Annie Mae could live off the sea, clamming and fishing. She worked as a berry picker and spud picker at one dollar per hour. Spud picking was back-breaking work. When she was seventeen she decided there was nothing to hold her on the Micmac reserve. She was eager and determined to make something of herself, to find out things. For many Micmacs, Boston was the mecca, the big city with a capital B, and to Boston she went.

She had met a young Micmac, Jake Maloney, and married him. They had two daughters. For a while she lived like a white middle-class housewife in a middle-class home. She was a sharp dresser, even wore dyed beehive hairdos, but she wanted to remain an Indian. She wanted her daughters to grow up as Indians. Jake’s and her beliefs conflicted. They started to quarrel. He beat her. She left and divorced him. She had to fight him for the custody of her daughters. In the end she won. Her own children, at one time, told her that they preferred living with their father because he could give them the many things they wanted, things Annie Mae would not be able to give them if they lived Indian style on Boston’s skid row. They preferred their white stepmother to their real one. Annie Mae grew into a Native American militant. She got into the same kind of fights that Barb and I had fought. She gave herself to the cause and that meant giving her children to her sister Mary to care for. That was hard and heart-wrenching. It was the sacrifice Annie Mae made to the movement—her motherhood. One thing she got out of her marriage: her husband was a martial arts freak and a professional karate teacher. Annie Mae became his sparring partner and learned some good chops and kicks. She knew when and on whom to use them.

Annie Mae met her first AIM people on November 26, 1970, when Russel Means and two hundred militants buried Plymouth Rock under a ton of sand, as a “symbolic burial of the white man’s conquest.” Among the tribes represented were New England Wampanoags, Narraganset, and Passamaquoddy, as well as a group of Micmacs, Annie Mae among them, calling themselves the “first victims of the wrath of the WASP.” Later Annie Mae was among those who with war whoops boarded Mayflower II, the replica of the vessel that had brought the pilgrims to the New World. She watched Russel climb up the rigging, waving a pirate’s blunderbuss, shouting: “Don’t let us pick this up! We don’t want to take up the gun again. But if you force us to, watch out!” This first meeting with AIM had on Annie Mae the same effect my first encounter had on me. It decided her fate. It decided when and how she would die.

In the beginning of 1972, or thereabouts, Annie Mae found herself a lover, Nogeeshik Aquash. Nogeeshik was a Canadian Indian who, Annie Mae told me, came from an island in the Great Lakes area. He looked and acted like an Indian, but at the same time was unlike any other Indian I knew. He was good-looking in a sinister way. His face was very pale with a sort of Fu-Manchu mustache and a tiny, scraggly goatee. He was very slim, elegantly emaciated. He had the movements of a cat, or maybe a spider. Paleness contrasting with his black hair, he sometimes reminded me of a handsome ghost. He is a good artist and lithographer. He dressed Indian, but again in a strange, unique way. He always wore a special sort of little, flat black hat with a feather stuck in it. Together they worked in the movement. On the side they started Indian fashion shows and became involved in exhibiting and sponsoring Indian crafts and jewelry. Annie Mae took part in the takeover of the BIA building and later she and Nogeeshik went to Wounded Knee. Right after Annie Mae helped me give birth, she and Nogeeshik were married in the Indian way. As Leonard was then with Russel Means in Washington trying to arrange a cease-fire, our friend the medicine man Wallace Black Elk performed the ceremony. They were joined together with the pipe and the star blanket. They were cedared up and smoked the sacred tobacco while four men and four women made a flesh offering for them. “A marriage like this,” Black Elk told them, “lasts forever.”

It did not work out that way. Their relationship turned sour. For a while they lived in Ottawa and that town was not good for them. Nogeeshik did a lot of barhopping and sometimes took Annie Mae along. He was moody to begin with, but when drunk he became abusive. Annie Mae told me, “He was torturing my mind. He did not treat me right.” White women were attracted to him and he flaunted them in Annie Mae’s face. Once or twice, she said, he beat her, or at least tried to. She could take care of herself if it came to physical confrontations. They split up a few times but always got together again until finally she got to a point where she could not take it anymore. She told me, “We had a quarrel and he broke the pipe, the sacred pipe we were married with at the Knee. For no reason at all. Then I knew that it was all over and I left him for good.”

After that she stayed on and off with us at Crow Dog’s Paradise. She got very high up in the councils of AIM, to the extent of helping set movement policies. She had no luck with men. She was a very strong-hearted woman and that made some men uncomfortable. In the months before her death she got really close to Leonard Peltier. She admired him, and could not do enough for him. I still think that he would have been the ideal man for her, but things turned out tragically for both of them.

Annie Mae came to us to take part in the 1974 and 1975 Sun Dance. She came alone. She put up a tipi in back of our house and there she lived. She liked being with us Sioux. She tried learning to speak our language. She started making Sioux arts and crafts. Tough in a fight, she was gentle and comforting to any of the people who were sick or in despair. Everybody liked her, and many depended on her. She pared her existence down to the very basics, to the simplest way of tipi living.

At that time many other people besides her were camping on our place, and someone stole a necklace and earrings she had, worth about five or six hundred dollars. She said, “I have no need of such things anymore. Whoever took them is welcome to the stuff. I am only sorry that skins are ripping off skins.” She came over to the house and dumped all her clothes and possessions on the table, telling me, “Keep these. This is for you. I’d rather not have anything at all, just whatever I have on my back. That’s good enough for my execution.” Ever since Wounded Knee she had had premonitions of approaching death. “I’ve fought too hard,” she said. “They won’t let Indians like me live. That’s all right. I don’t want to grow up to be an old woman.” She talked that way often, almost cheerfully, without a trace of sentimentality. All she was left with then were her jeans, ribbon shirt, and Levi’s jacket. That was all.

She wanted to take Leonard and me to the Micmac country, to Nova Scotia, to Shubenakadie, to Pictou’s Landing, to all the tiny Micmac reserves which, as she jokingly said, are not much larger than a football field—the king-size ones. She told me that her Micmac people were losing their culture and their language. She said that every year her people go to an island and have ceremonies there, but that these rituals are becoming Christianized. She wanted to take Leonard to her tribe to teach them, to let them see that the old Indian ways still exist.

Leonard taught her the way of Grandfather Peyote. She liked to come to the meetings and was learning the songs. During a half-moon ceremony she had a vision. She was sitting beside me when it came to her. She said that she saw the moon turn into a prison, a jail with round walls, and inside it she saw the tiny figures of Indians leaving this prison, walking toward a big fire, walking right into the flames. And inside the fire was a man beckoning to her. And so she also walked into the flames. She told me: “I have experienced pain and the ecstasy and the glory of the fire which will consume me soon. A fire that will make me free.”

Annie Mae still traveled a lot. Wherever Indians fought for their rights, Annie Mae was there. She helped the Menominee warriors take over a monastery. She told me that she was packing a gun. She said, “If any of my brothers are in a position where they’re being shot at, or being killed, I go there to fight with them. I’d rather die than stand by and see them destroyed.” No matter how often Annie Mae left us, she always showed up again at our place.

I read somewhere in an anthropology book that we Sioux “thrive on a culture of excitement.” During the years from 1973 to 1975 we had more than enough excitement for even the most macho warrior, more than we could handle. Wilson, the tribal chairman at Pine Ridge, had established a regime of terror. Being shot at or having one’s house fire-bombed were daily occurrences Pine Ridge people had to live with. Pine Ridge and our own reservation have a common border, and the violence spilled over onto Rosebud. Many people who either opposed Wilson, belonged to AIM or OSCRO, or had been at Wounded Knee were brutally murdered. Some estimate that as many as two hundred and fifty people, women and children among them, were killed during this time—out of a population of eight thousand! Between forty and fifty of these murders have been listed in official government files. The vast majority of these killings were never investigated. Among the victims was one of our best friends, Pedro Bissonette, leader of OSCRO, the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization. He was shot to death by tribal police on a lonely road, “resisting arrest” as they claimed. One of his relatives, Jeanette Bissonette, was shot and killed driving home from the burial of another victim. Byron De Sersa was shot to death on account of an article critical of the Wilson regime his father had written in a local Indian newspaper. Wallace Black Elk’s brother was killed in a mysterious explosion when entering his home and turning on the light. Our oldest and most respected medicine man, Frank Fools Crow, was firebombed and had his horses killed and his sweat lodge with all his sacred things destroyed. Leonard’s family suffered too. His niece, Jancita Eagle Deer, was killed in an unexplained “accident” after having been savagely beaten. She had last been seen in the car of her lover, who later turned out to be an informer and who had brutally mistreated her many times before. Jancita was then suing a high South Dakota official for rape. Her mother, Delphine, Leonard’s older sister, wanted to take up the suit, but was beaten to death by a BIA policeman who claimed “drunkenness” as his excuse. Her battered corpse, her arms and legs fractured, was found in the snow, the tears frozen on her cheeks. A nephew went up into the hills and never came back. His body was found with a bullet in it. And so it went, on and on.

It came to a point where nobody felt safe anymore, not even in their own homes. Once, when a car backfired near our house, all of our children immediately took cover under beds and behind walls. They thought the goons had arrived. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the movement became an object of attention for the FBI’s Cointelpro and Cablesplicer projects. AIM was infiltrated by a number of informers and agents provocateurs. I hardly think that AIM deserved that much attention. This infiltration, together with the never-ending violence, brought on a general state of paranoia. The agents stirred up mistrust among us until nobody trusted anybody anymore. Husbands suspected their wives, sisters their brothers. Old friends who had fought many civil rights battles together began to be afraid of each other. Those inside prisons suspected those who remained free. Men sentenced to longer terms suspected those who were released sooner. Even some of the leaders began doubting each other—and by then Annie Mae was a leader.

It did not surprise me when the rumors started that she was an FBI undercover agent. People were saying: “Look at that woman, she is always traveling. Wherever something happens, she’s there. So she must be an informer.” Annie Mae came to me and cried. She said, “The goons are after me. They might kill me as they have killed so many others. I don’t know what to do. If I get killed I don’t want my children to think that I died working for the enemy. Promise me, if the goons blow me away, to tell my girls that I died true to my beliefs, fighting for my people.”

For a while Annie Mae stayed at the point of greatest danger. She was helping Sioux women intimidated by the goons in Oglala, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where Dennis Banks had set up a camp of opponents to Wilson’s rule. That was like going into the lions’ den. On June 26, 1975, the FBI invaded the little settlement in force under the pretext of investigating, of all things, the theft of an old pair of boots. Whether the FBI people were just dumb or whether they wanted to provoke an incident, I cannot say. What is sure is that their wading into that explosive situation was the spark that blew up the whole powder keg. A firefight started. It ended with one Indian and two agents dead. It may have been pure coincidence that this happened on the ninety-ninth anniversary of the Custer battle. Among those accused of having shot the feds was Leonard Peltier, Annie Mae’s close friend. The witnesses against him later withdrew their testimony, saying that they had been nowhere near and that they had testified against him only under threats and compulsions. Peltier is now doing two lifetimes in the white man’s prisons.

In the aftermath of this incident, the situation at Pine Ridge got totally out of hand. The whole reservation was in a state of panic. Annie Mae did not even dare use her own name anymore. She took refuge with us, again staying in the tipi behind our house. She was at Crow Dog’s place when the big bust occurred. On September 5, 1975, the whole SWAT team, about a hundred and eighty agents in bulletproof vests with M-16s, rubber boats, helicopters, heavy vehicles, and artificial smog fell upon our and Old Man Henry’s homes, as well as upon Annie Mae’s little tent and the cabin of Crow Dog’s sister and brother-in-law, less than a mile away. It was an Omaha Beach type of assault, like the movies one saw on TV of actions in Vietnam. We found out, much later, that the FBI thought that Peltier was hiding out at our place, which was completely untrue.

When the feds saw Annie Mae, they said, “We’ve been looking for you.” They handcuffed her, throwing her around like a rag doll. When they were dragging her into the squad car she smiled at me and gave me the Indian Power sign with her fists even though she was handcuffed. They questioned her and questioned her although she had not been anywhere near the scene of the shootout. The FBI was convinced that she knew where Peltier was hiding. They knew how close she was to him. Then, suddenly, they let her go for lack of evidence. She came to see me. She related to me what had happened to her. The agents had told her that she would not live long if she did not tell them everything she knew and some things she could not have known—where some people had gone to ground, for instance. If she did not talk and if she did not do everything they wanted, she wasn’t going to live. They would make sure she’d be dead—or put her away for the rest of her life, which would be worse.

She said to me: “They offered me my freedom and money if I’d testify the way they wanted. I have those two choices now. I chose my kind of freedom, not their kind, even if I have to die. They let me go because they are sure I’ll lead them to Peltier. They’re watching me. I don’t hear them or see them, but I know they’re out there somewhere. I can feel it.”

I told her to stay with us if she wanted to, she was welcome to move in with me anytime. I told her to take care of herself. She said: “Maybe this is the last time we can talk together. Remember, your husband is an important man to his people. Love him and protect him from all bad things. Don’t let this white man’s culture destroy him. Don’t let him drink. Don’t let him go with people who might do him harm. Watch him. He is a good man. He is needed.”

I saw her one more time in Pierre, South Dakota, when Leonard went on trial. She had come to support him and to comfort me, to give us courage. We were all staying at the Holiday Inn. She came to my room. She did not say anything much, she was just sitting on the bed looking at me. She said, “I just wanted to see you. You won’t see me again.” We talked about a few unimportant things, said our goodbyes, shook hands, hugged each other, and she cried and cried. That was the last time I saw her. It was as if she had heard Hinhan, the owl, hoot for her, death calling her. She knew and she accepted it.

In the last days of November 1975 just disappeared. Everybody said, “Annie Mae has gone underground.” At the same time I had to take leave of my husband, who was sent to prison on Wounded Knee–related charges. Leonard was held in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a maximum-security prison. I went with my little son Pedro to New York to stay with white friends so that I could be close to him, within visiting distance. It was there, in New York, in early March 1976, that I got a phone call from a friend in Rapid City, telling me that Annie Mae Aquash had been found dead in the snow at the foot of a steep bluff near Wanblee on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The FBI was there at once, swarming over her. They shipped her to Scotts Bluff for an autopsy. They cut her hands off to send to Washington for identification—a needless cruelty as they could have made fingerprints on the spot without mutilating her. It seems that those who killed her had also raped her. She was buried in a pauper’s grave. After the FBI had identified her, an official report was issued that she had died of exposure. The implication was that here was just another drunken Indian passing out and freezing to death. But no alcohol or drugs had been found in the autopsy.

Annie Mae’s friends and relatives were not satisfied. They obtained a court order to exhume the body and had their own pathologist perform a second autopsy. He at once found a bullet hole in her skull, found the bullet, too, a .32-caliber slug. He also found the cut-off hands thrown with the body into the coffin. William Janklow, the attorney general of the State of South Dakota, had said that the only way to deal with renegade AIM Indians was to put a bullet through their heads, and someone had taken the hint. Leonard could occasionally call me collect from the prison. When I told him that Annie Mae had died, and how, he wept over the phone. We cried together. He would have liked to be the one to bury her, but that could not be.

Annie Mae Aquash is dead. Leonard Peltier is doing two lifetimes. Maybe the prison hacks let him wear the moccasins she made for him. Nogeeshik was in a bad car accident and is now a wheelchair case. Leonard and I still have a lot of things she once treasured, which she gave to us. Someday I am going to find out who killed this good, gently tough, gifted friend of mine who did not deserve to die. Someday I will tell her daughters that she died for them, died like a warrior. Someday I will see Annie Mae. In a strange way I feel that she died so that I, and many others, could survive. That she died because she had made a secret vow, like a Sun Dancer who, obedient to his vow, pierces his flesh and undergoes the pain for all the people so that the people may live.