Last year on Aboriginal Day, I attended the funeral service of Mi’kmaq activist and community member Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash. The day, June 21, marked the return of Indian Brook’s own woman warrior to her home community.
As a member of the same community, I felt privileged and honoured to sit and watch a service so beautiful and unique. The funeral itself was a mixture of a Catholic and a traditional aboriginal service – symbolizing both who she was before she left Indian Brook and who she became while she was away.
I never met Anna Mae. Like most people my age on the reserve, I only heard about Anna Mae through my parents and other adults who grew up with her. She had already moved to the United States by the time I was born. I only knew what she looked like from a single snapshot my father took of her in Boston in the late 1960s. Growing up, all I really knew were the facts: She grew up in Indian Brook. She moved to Boston in the 1960s. While she was there, she joined the American Indian Movement. And sometime in the mid-1970s, her frozen body was found on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where she was buried.
I became more interested in Anna Mae when I was a teenager. While I was in high school, I read the only book I could find about her, The Life and Death of Anna Mae Aquash, by journalist Johanna Brand. From that book, I learned for the first time that Anne Mae died after being shot in the head. Only then did I realize that she was deeply involved in the American Indian Movement. And that she was on the lam from the FBI when her body was discovered by a rancher in Pine Ridge.
My interest in Anna Mae and her death was renewed while I was attending journalism school in Toronto in the early 1990s. I re-read the book not so much to learn more of her mysterious death, but to try to piece together her life while she was in the United States.
Years later, one thought kept going through my mind: How did a Mi’kmaq woman from my home community wind up heavily involved in the American Indian Movement in the mid-western United States? Why would she travel away from her family and friends to become a political activist halfway across North America?
In that book, Anna Mae’s life seemed surreal. Like many people from my community, she grew up poor and moved to the United States in her late teens to look for work in the blueberry fields of Maine. While she was living in the States, she became an educator because she believed education would help aboriginal children escape poverty. And she joined the American Indian Movement because she knew the life of aboriginal people in North America didn’t seem right and she wanted to help fix it.
Anna Mae became active in the American Indian Movement after she participated in two key events in the United States in the early 1970s – the Trail of Broken Treaties march to Washington, D.C., and the Wounded Knee occupation on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Both events put a spotlight on aboriginal peoples’ fight for treaty recognition and escaping a life of poverty.
Anna Mae’s death was, and still is, surrounded in controversy. In 2003, U.S. authorities charged two members of the American Indian Movement with her kidnapping and murder. Last year, a 12-member jury convicted one of those members, Arlo Looking-Cloud, of first-degree murder. Another member living in Canada, John Graham, is awaiting extradition to the U.S. to face the charges.
So now, Aboriginal Day takes on a special meaning in my community because it’s also the day we celebrate the anniversary of her return. This year, the community chose to continue its celebration of her life, rather than dwell on the controversy surrounding her death. Sporting events such as bicycle races, floor hockey and ball games were organized to commemorate the work she did with children. The weeklong celebration ended with a weekend powwow to honour her memory.
I’m not sure to what extent her efforts affected social policy here in Canada or in the United States. Perhaps her voice was merely echoing the changing climate of all aboriginal people on both sides of the border who began to advocate for a better way of life. All I can say is that the education and employment opportunities Anna Mae advocated and worked towards were there for me while I was growing up. I’d like to think she played a small part in raising people’s social conscience to create those sorts of opportunities for the generations that followed her.
Maureen Googoo is a Mi’kmaq journalist living and working in Halifax.
