APRIL 25, 2014
ON FEB. 24, 1976, A RANCHER IN SOUTH DAKOTA WAS INSTALLING A FENCE ON LAND SITUATED ALONG IT WOULD TAKE INVESTIGATORS A WEEK TO IDENTIFY THE BODY AS THAT OF 30-YEAR-OLD ANNA MAE PICTOU AQUASH, A PRINCIPAL IN THE AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT. AIM WAS THE COUNTRY’S MOST VISIBLE, AND RADICAL, ADVOCACY GROUP FOR NATIVE AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS. THE TRAVELING BAND OF MILITANTS HAD FORCIBLY TAKEN OVER THE BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS HEADQUARTERS IN WASHINGTON TO DEMAND, AMONG OTHER THINGS, THE RETURN OF VALUABLE FEDERAL LAND TO INDIGENOUS TRIBES. “WE’RE THE LANDLORD OF THIS COUNTRY,” ONE SLOGAN WENT. “AND THE RENT IS DUE
.”
Who Killed Anna Mae?
AIM
was founded in Minneapolis in 1968, the same year the Black Panthers
— the movement’s model — ambushed Oakland police officers and
Cesar Chavez fasted to promote nonviolence. Its leaders included
Dennis Banks and Russell Means, telegenic spokesmen in traditional
braids, buckskin fringe and cowboy boots. They would publish memoirs,
act in Hollywood films and address crowds on Ivy League campuses.
Where Means was full of bluster and indignation (Andy Warhol painted
his portrait), Banks was soulful and charismatic. The Los Angeles
Times once called them “the two most famous Indians since Sitting
Bull and Crazy Horse.”
Aquah
had been having an affair with Banks the year she disappeared. Although he was in a common-law marriage with someone else, Aquash
was convinced that she was his true match. They met almost three
years earlier at the siege of Wounded Knee, a 10-week armed standoff
between residents of Pine Ridge who opposed the tribal government and
agents from the National Guard, the U.S. Marshals Service and the
F.B.I. (Wounded Knee was chosen because that was where more than 200
Indians were killed by the U.S. Cavalry in 1890.) When she heard
about the revolt there, Aquash, a Mikmaq Indian from Canada, left her
two young daughters with her sister in Boston and traveled to join
AIM volunteers who had taken up the cause. “These white people
think this country belongs to them,” Aquash wrote in a letter to
her sister at the time. “The whole country changed with only a
handful of raggedy-ass pilgrims that came over here in the 1500s. And
it can take a handful of raggedy-ass Indians to do the same, and I
intend to be one of those raggedy-ass Indians.” On her first night
in South Dakota, Banks told her that newcomers were needed on kitchen
duty. “Mr. Banks,” she replied, “I didn’t come here to wash
dishes. I came here to fight.”
At
the time of Aquash’s death, AIM was splintering and Banks was a
fugitive. Prosecutors had filed criminal charges against many of the
participants at Wounded Knee — by one count, more than 400 arrests
and 275 indictments. Banks, already facing a 15-year prison sentence
for unrelated charges of rioting and assault, claimed that he feared
for his life. William Janklow, who was running for state attorney
general, told a newspaper during his campaign, “The only way to
deal with the Indian problem in South Dakota is to put a gun to AIM
leaders’ heads and pull the trigger.”
For
a time, Pine Ridge’s murder rate was the highest in the nation. So
locals were not all that surprised when Anna Mae Aquash turned up
dead: She was just one more soldier lost in the fight against a
government that had, after all, dedicated itself for centuries to the
subjugation of the country’s native peoples. But over the last
decade, several teams of state and federal attorneys in South Dakota
have established that her killing was in fact an inside job,
orchestrated by AIM members who believed she was working as an F.B.I.
informer.
To
Aquash’s compatriots, watching the truth seep out has been
unsettling. It’s easy, so many years on, to forget the tumult of
the civil rights era: the blood in the streets, the palace
revolutions. What to do when the search for answers reveals that
several of your own were actually the culprits? What if, in the final
unfolding of this morality play, the heroes turn out to have acted
unheroically?
“You
think you want the dirty details, but you don’t,” Aquash’s
friend Margo Thunderbird told me recently. “The movement was the
defining experience in our lives, but the only thing my daughter
learned about Annie Mae — in an Indian school — was not the
principles she fought for, but how she was killed by AIM. Once, I
prayed at sun dance: ‘Show me who did this to her.’ Anna Mae came
to me in a dream and said, ‘Leave me alone, Margo.’ ”
Between
1976 and 1999, four grand juries took up the case without producing
any arrests. Nobody associated with AIM would talk about it under
oath, and the investigation remained a black hole — until, in 2000,
a woman named Darlene (Ka-Mook) Nichols was persuaded to help.
Once,
I prayed at sun dance: ‘‘Show me who did this to her.’’ Anna
Mae came to me in a dream and said, ‘‘Leave me alone, Margo.’’
Continue
reading the main storyNichols was Aquash’s friend, but also her
rival, as Dennis Banks’s common-law wife. Just a few months before
the murder, she learned of his affair with Aquash. That’s one of
many reasons, Nichols said, that her motives for cooperating with
investigators have been questioned. In the eyes of AIM loyalists and
among residents of her native Pine Ridge, it amounts to heresy. “But
more than anything, I just wanted to get to the bottom of it, to find
out what happened,” Nichols told me recently. “So many people
have tried so hard to make it go away.”Nichols was 17 when she met
Banks. It was 1972, and he brought an AIM squad to town to hold a
series of rallies. The next year, she abandoned her plans for college
and ran off with him. “He called and said he’d made arrangements
for me to fly and meet him,” Nichols recalled. “I’d told him I
had to break up with my boyfriend and finish high school first. From
that point on, we were a couple.”
Banks
and Nichols had four children together, but it was an unstable life.
All around them were arraignments, car chases, shootouts with the
police. “It was one thing after another,” she said. “At the
time, I didn’t think about the consequences. I believed in the
movement. That was my world.”
When
Banks went into hiding in 1975, Nichols and Aquash joined him at
various times as his entourage moved throughout the West for more
than three months. In Los Angeles, Marlon Brando, an AIM sympathizer,
lent Banks a motor home and $10,000 for food and gas. Also along for
the ride was Leonard Peltier, who was wanted in connection with the
murder of two F.B.I. agents on Pine Ridge. In November, the group was
heading south through Oregon when a state trooper pulled over the
R.V., which was full of guns and explosives, and ordered everybody
out. Peltier took off on foot and was shot in the back, but he
escaped into the woods. (He would later be captured, convicted and
sentenced to life in prison, despite the efforts of celebrities and
human rights activists who claimed that he didn’t receive a fair
trial.) Banks stayed behind the wheel and sped away as officers shot
at him.
Continue
reading the main story
When
the gunshots stopped, the two women were taken to jail, where they
shared a cell. Nichols said they got along, despite Aquash’s
romantic involvement with Banks. “I was over it by now,” she told
me. “I mean, why should I lose a friend because of Dennis? We never
talked about him. We read a lot of magazines.”
But
Aquash wasn’t as nonchalant. Though her affair with Banks was
brief, she was devastated when, in early 1975, he ended it to remain
with Nichols. According to “The Life and Death of Anna Mae Aquash,”
by Johanna Brand, Aquash wrote a poem:
But
the sun is up and you’re going?
My
heart is filled with tears
please
don’t go, I need you walking by my side. . . .
The
road is long and weary
And
I get so tired. . . .
Aquash
was a powerful figure in AIM, but also something of an outsider.
Having grown up in the Maritime tribes of Nova Scotia, she joined the
American struggle knowing hardly a soul. She was tough and boyishly
pretty. One photograph from that time shows Aquash digging a foxhole
with a golf club.
Photo
Dennis
Banks in the 1970s.CreditPhotograph by Michelle Vignes/The Bancroft
Library/University of California, Berkeley
It
was not lost on Aquash that while women made up roughly half of the
movement’s ranks, Banks, Means and a handful of men got all the
attention. “We were doing what Indian women did for thousands of
years, which was stand behind the men and prop them up,” says Margo
Thunderbird, who worked with Aquash in St. Paul and California,
writing speeches for AIM’s leaders. “We wanted to present an
image, and the angry Indian man was better than angry Indian women.
Anna Mae and I said to each other, ‘Do we want to be the ones who
get in their way?’ The men were showtime.”
There
was tension among the male leaders. Banks, an Ojibwa from Minnesota,
needed the support of the Sioux tribes, who were naturally loyal to
Means, a South Dakota native. His union with Nichols was regarded as
an “alliance marriage,” according to Robert Warrior, a former
director of the American Indian studies program at the University of
Illinois and co-author of “Like a Hurricane,” a book about AIM’s
early history. “A lot of people respected Dennis in the Sioux
world, and that is hard for an Ojibwa to do,” Warrior says.
“They’re old foes. The Ojibwa essentially drove the Sioux out of
Minnesota 200 years ago and forced them west. The Sioux still carry
that around.” Banks took to certain rituals, such as the Sioux
sweat lodge and sun-dance ceremonies. “I became much more one of
them rather than Ka-Mook becoming one of mine,” Banks told me.
Aquash’s
friends say her affair with Banks brought particular resentment from
a group of militant, mostly Sioux women who called themselves the Pie
Patrol and viewed her as a threat to AIM’s stability. Jean Roach, a
young AIM supporter at the time, described the Pie Patrol to me as
the ones who got on other women’s cases for things like wearing a
bikini top to the AIM office in Rapid City. “They didn’t like
Anna Mae at all,” Roach said.
By
this point, AIM had become a vortex of paranoia. “Different crews
were ‘bad-jacketing’ each other, calling them pigs,” or
collaborators with the feds, says Aquash’s friend Melvin Lee
Houston. “Someone put a jacket on Anna Mae. I’m angry with my
brothers and sisters for not stopping it.”
Darlene
(Ka-Mook) Nichols in 1982.CreditPhotograph by Michelle Vignes/The
Bancroft Library/University of California, Berkeley
Continue
reading the main story
When
the women were in jail together, Nichols realized that Aquash was
terrified about being released. Aquash told her she was aware that
some people thought she was a turncoat. Suspicions had arisen when
she was quickly let go after an earlier arrest, while others who had
been with her stood trial. In Brando’s motor home, Peltier had
confessed to both women that he shot an F.B.I. agent, making a gun
with his thumb and forefinger and telling them that the man “was
begging for his life, but I shot him anyway.” If Aquash ever shared
that with the authorities, it would make her a significant threat to
Peltier and AIM. Aquash told Nichols that she feared for her life.
Soon, the women were escorted by marshals to the back of a commercial
airplane, flown to Wichita and then sent to separate jails —
Nichols in Kansas and Aquash in South Dakota. Aquash was again
swiftly released on bail.
“It
was the last time I saw her,” Nichols said. A month later, Aquash
was dead.
“For
a long time, it was a given among Indians that the F.B.I. engineered
Aquash’s murder as a way of scaring and destabilizing AIM,” says
Paul DeMain, the editor of News From Indian Country, whose aggressive
reporting on the case is often credited with spurring investigators’
interest in it. AIM considered itself at war with the federal
government and its proxy, the F.B.I., whose Counterintelligence
Program was devised to monitor and take down the radicals of the New
Left that the bureau deemed “subversive,” including the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Weather Underground. AIM’s
concerns weren’t entirely unfounded. A few months before Aquash was
killed, one of Banks’s bodyguards, Douglas Durham, appeared on
national TV to declare that he was actually a “paid F.B.I.
operative” who’d been assigned to infiltrate AIM. Adding to the
conspiracy theory was a hasty initial autopsy that somehow missed the
bullet in Aquash’s head.
“The
great obstacle with Anna Mae all along has been the disconnect of
trust from the witnesses we needed,” says Rod Oswald, who became
one of the case’s lead prosecutors. “It’s something they’ve
passed down to their kids, almost like a legend: The F.B.I. killed
her and covered it up, and therefore there was no way the federal
government could bring justice to the Native American people.”
Investigators needed a collaborator who could, like Nichols, approach
AIM members up and down the chain of command.
Once, I prayed at sun dance: ‘‘Show me who did this to her.’’ Anna Mae came to me in a dream and said, ‘‘Leave me alone, Margo.’’ ’
Nichols
was still incarcerated on Dec. 30, 1975, when she gave birth to a
daughter, her second with Banks. They named her Tiopa Maza Win, or
Iron Door Woman. Soon after, she was released and reunited with
Banks, who had been found and arrested but was out on bail.
California’s governor, Jerry Brown, granted him asylum, and the
family settled in Davis.
“We
tried to live as normal as possible,” Nichols said. She took
classes at U.C. Davis. Banks became a chancellor at D-Q University,
an Indian college, and a guest lecturer at Stanford. Their respite
lasted until 1983, when George Deukmejian, elected to succeed Brown
as governor, vowed to force Banks from the state. About an hour after
Deukmejian was sworn in, Banks’s house was surrounded by the
police. But he and his family were already gone, en route to the
Onondaga Reservation in upstate New York. “The cops couldn’t
arrest Dennis as long as he stayed on Indian land,” Nichols said.
“He got a job at the smoke shop on the Interstate. The next year,
he said he was tired of running. He finally turned himself in and
spent a year in prison.”
In
1989, Nichols told Banks she was fed up with his womanizing and left
him. She moved to Santa Fe and left AIM behind, until one day in
1999, when she received a newspaper clipping about the Aquash case in
the mail from her mother. Some AIM members were claiming that one of
several factions in the organization was responsible. “It started
to make sense,” Nichols said. She began asking friends from Pine
Ridge what they knew and learned that “for years, everybody had
been hearing the stories,” she said.
The
contours of the plot were the same in every version: Aquash left the
federal courthouse in Pierre on Nov. 24, 1975, when she made bail and
was released from jail. She didn’t show up for a court hearing the
next day. According to friends, Aquash was desperate to see Banks and
made her way to Denver, where she thought she would meet him.
Continue
reading the main story
She
stayed at the home of Troy Lynn Yellow Wood, a sister-in-arms whose
apartment functioned as a safe house for AIM members. “A lot of
people used to come to my house, and probably some of them may have
been wanted by the law, too,” Yellow Wood told me. “It wasn’t
unusual.” Aquash slept there for more than a week, but Banks never
showed up. She passed the time writing letters to her sister and
looking after her host’s children.
One
night in early December, a car pulled up to the safe house — then
another, and then two more, until there were as many as a dozen
visitors in the ground-floor apartment. Aquash left with three people
in a red Pinto and was never heard from again.
Nichols
was struck by the number of people Aquash apparently encountered in
the hours before her disappearance. “They were mostly women, and
people I knew well,” she told me. She decided to go to the F.B.I.
Before
one meeting, she requested that Robert Ecoffey, who worked on Pine
Ridge for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and had been the first Indian
to be named a federal marshal, also be present. “Basically, I
needed the emotional support,” she said. Although Nichols hadn’t
spoken to Ecoffey since grade school, she knew he was working on the
Aquash case. “We were on different sides of the fence always, but I
trusted him,” she said. “He used to throw paper airplanes at me
that said, ‘I love you.’ ” When Ecoffey saw that the witness
who had asked for him was Nichols, she said, “he almost fell out of
his chair.” Years later, she married him.
The
F.B.I. asked Nichols if she would wear a wire, and she agreed. She
was given the code name Maverick, and over the next year she
interviewed about 10 witnesses and surreptitiously recorded several
dozen hours of discussion about Aquash’s final days.
Most
of the people she spoke with made for ambivalent witnesses, reluctant
to cooperate with the government even if it meant solving the murder
of one of their own. “I don’t hate Ka-Mook for wanting to know
the answers,” Yellow Wood said, “but she should have come to us
privately. Basically, we were left with a choice: You were either a
co-conspirator or a traitor.”
Still,
Yellow Wood was, in retrospect, mortified that she had watched idly
as Aquash was led to her death. She says that she picked up her phone
to call the police before Aquash left with her captors, but that
another woman hung it up while she was on hold, and she let the
matter go.
Eventually,
Nichols broke the case open with a three-hour recording of Arlo
Looking Cloud, a low-level AIM associate who had admitted to friends
that he was involved. She picked him up from a Denver jail and in her
car began asking him about the night of Aquash’s disappearance.
“Arlo was very emotional when I would ask him certain questions,”
Nichols later testified. “There were times when he became choked
up.” She urged him to cooperate with the authorities, and
eventually he confessed and took the stand against John Graham,
another AIM member, naming him as the gunman. “It was getting kind
of blue out,” Looking Cloud testified, recounting how they marched
Aquash at dawn into grassland off South Dakota Highway 73 and put a
pistol to her head. “She started praying. It was so quick.” The
men were tried separately for the murder, Looking Cloud in 2004 and
Graham in 2010. Both were convicted.
The
case was far from solved, however. Prosecutors never believed that
Looking Cloud and Graham acted alone. Both were minimally involved in
the movement and didn’t even know Aquash. “We do feel pretty
certain word came to them from high up in the organization,” says
Oswald, the prosecutor. Several witnesses, including Looking Cloud,
described a third abductor, Theda Nelson Clark, who drove them, along
with Aquash, from Denver to the scene of the shooting in her red
Pinto.
Continue
reading the main story
Clark,
who was 50 in 1975, was a matriarch in AIM, revered but hardly
beloved. “Aunt Theda was mean, bossy and obnoxious,” Yellow Wood,
her niece, told me. Aquash was brought out with her hands tied.
Looking Cloud said Clark handed Graham the gun.
But
she was never charged. “I thought it was a slam dunk,” Oswald
says, but other prosecutors were hesitant to try a woman who was in
failing health and living in a nursing home. Clark died in October
2011 at 87.
And
even Clark appeared to have acted at the behest of someone else.
Another woman, a former girlfriend of Banks, admitted in court that
she told Clark to ferry Aquash to South Dakota to be “dealt with”
— instructions that she in turn was relaying from Thelma Rios, an
AIM activist in Rapid City. While the government managed to extract a
guilty plea from Rios for kidnapping — her five-year sentence was
commuted, and she died of lung cancer in 2011 — she said she was
passing down the order from yet two other women. She also
acknowledged hearing two people say of Aquash: “The bitch should be
offed.” The two names were redacted from Rios’s plea agreement
but are widely believed to be those of Madonna Thunder Hawk and
Lorelei DeCora. They, along with Rios and several other women, made
up the Pie Patrol.
‘They’re never going to solve this. When they called me, I just told them, ‘‘I do not talk to the feds.’’ . . . You can’t reason with a thug.
The
events Rios described before a judge sounded like a game of
telephone, with several layers of women employed to insulate the
others while carrying out the hit. They all had close ties to AIM’s
leaders: Rios was married to one of Banks’s deputies and
bodyguards; Thunder Hawk and Russell Means were cousins; DeCora was
Means’s sister-in-law. (Means died in 2012.) Prosecutors zeroed in
on the Pie Patrol and learned that the three women held an
“interrogation” of Aquash at a house in Rapid City in the hours
before she was killed. Candy Hamilton, who was upstairs in the house
at the time, told me, “I’d had an argument with Thelma and
Lorelei earlier, because they felt Annie Mae was a snitch.”
But
there was not enough evidence to charge Thunder Hawk or DeCora or
compel them to cooperate, Oswald says. “And we still consider it
extremely unlikely that anybody could pull off the murder of Dennis
Banks’s girlfriend without the blessing of one of the men in
charge.”
Prosecutors
were willing to offer Thunder Hawk and DeCora immunity in exchange
for testimony and corroborating evidence that implicated someone in
charge. Both refused to discuss the case with investigators.
Continue
reading the main story
THUNDER
HAWK, WHO HELPED ORGANIZE AIM’S OCCUPATION OF THE BUREAU OF INDIAN
AFFAIRS IN 1972, IS STILL A PROMINENT INDIAN ACTIVIST. SHE SERVES AS
THE TRIBAL LIAISON TO THE LAKOTA PEOPLE’S LAW PROJECT AND IS
REPRESENTED BY THE SAME SPEAKERS’ BUREAU AS ANGELA DAVIS AND NOAM
CHOMSKY. WHEN I REACHED HER AT HER HOME ON THE CHEYENNE RIVER
RESERVATION IN SOUTH DAKOTA, SHE DENIED HAVING PLAYED A ROLE IN
AQUASH’S ABDUCTION OR DEATH. “BALONEY,” SHE SAID. “I NEVER
EVEN TRIED TO MAKE SENSE OF WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNA MAE. THEY’RE
NEVER GOING TO SOLVE THIS. WHEN THEY CALLED ME, I JUST TOLD THEM, ‘I
DO NOT TALK TO THE FEDS.’ CLICK. I HUNG UP. YOU CAN’T REASON WITH
A THUG. THEY’RE NOT PEOPLE.”
Through
her lawyer, DeCora also denied any involvement in Aquash’s murder.
Thunder
Hawk went on to tell me that her only direct interaction with Aquash
came at AIM’s legal-defense house in Rapid City. “People were
concerned because she was bragging about how she went down to the
F.B.I. office to tell them off,” Thunder Hawk said. “I didn’t
see it as a big threat, but it had to be handled, her going back and
forth like that. Because what if they tried to pin something on her?
So I talked to her. And before I could even finish, she said, ‘I go
where I want, and I have nothing to hide.’ ”
Continue
reading the main story
She
added: “There were hundreds of Anna Maes, just throwing themselves
at the men. And every time Dennis and these guys got a different
woman, the girls would think they were first lady.”
In
the spring of 2011, there was a break in the case, but it came from a
different unsolved murder on Pine Ridge. The victim was Ray Robinson,
a black civil rights volunteer from Alabama who disappeared in April
1973, not long after getting involved with AIM at Wounded Knee. His
wife, Cheryl Buswell, told me from her home in Detroit that he called
her when he got to South Dakota and said he planned to backpack into
the village at night to avoid checkpoints, so the authorities would
have no record of him. “I filed a missing-persons report but never
heard from the F.B.I. Nobody from AIM has ever responded to my
questions. It’s been festering, festering, festering.”
Oswald
came across Robinson’s name while looking at the transcripts of an
interview Nichols did with Banks in 2001. She had shown up at Banks’s
house in Minnesota, saying she was there to see their daughter Tiopa
and then luring him into a series of long reminiscences. At the time,
investigators considered the interview a bust, because Nichols was so
nervous and barely asked about Aquash. But Banks did discuss
Robinson. He told Nichols that Robinson was shot by another AIM
officer. He said he saw the corpse shortly afterward and puzzled over
what do. Finally, Banks said, he instructed an underling to “bury
him where no one will know.” He added that the underling was “gone
for about five hours” and that Robinson had been buried “over by
the creek.”
“I
was floored,” Oswald says. “Banks is not only aware of Robinson’s
killing, but where he was buried, and he acknowledges his own role in
where to bury the body.” It also lent credibility to the theory
that AIM’s leadership wasn’t averse to frontier justice.
Oswald
located a witness, Richard Two Elk, who was in a bunker where, he
said, Robinson provoked an altercation with AIM’s security team,
brandishing a knife and promptly getting himself shot in the kneecap.
To prosecutors hoping to solve the Robinson case itself, the story
came with a host of impediments: Two Elk said he didn’t see who the
gunman was, and the episode sounded more like an accidental killing
than a shooting with intent to kill (and because the act occurred on
federal land, the statute of limitations had expired for any charge
short of first-degree murder). But when it dawned on Oswald that the
reservation’s clinic was staffed by Madonna Thunder Hawk and
Lorelei DeCora, he became hopeful about using this crime to force
testimony in Aquash’s murder. He dug up another of Nichols’s
transcripts, this one with Thunder Hawk, and found that she
acknowledged seeing Robinson’s body at the clinic, where she said
he bled to death because he had not been brought in right away.
“That
didn’t prove intent to kill either, but the fact that these are the
same women we’re pursuing in the Aquash case — I’ve
successfully tried crimes in the past with much less evidence,”
Oswald says. If he could squeeze the Pie Patrol on the matter of
Robinson’s death, he reasoned, the women might now give up somebody
above them on Aquash’s murder in exchange for immunity. “Because
if we could flip a witness in each case, then I’m there,” he
says. “We could solve the two cases off of each other.” Oswald
also hoped to collect enough evidence, eventually, to approach Banks:
“I’d say: ‘Look, Dennis, we know you didn’t kill Ray
Robinson. I don’t care for the moment if you ordered the hit on
Anna Mae. Just tell us where he is.’ And it would be a house of
cards.”
Continue
reading the main story
Despite
his optimism, Oswald was instructed at the end of 2011 to shelve the
case. His supervisor, Brendan Johnson, the United States attorney for
South Dakota, had apparently determined that the odds of successfully
completing the investigation were low and closed it, pending new
information. Oswald, who left his prosecutor’s job in 2012, feels
that he was “this close to solving it” and told me that he hadn’t
given up.
But
most everyone else has. Richard Two Elk called it “idiot fuel” to
think that the murders of Aquash and Robinson might someday be
resolved. “I don’t know if you can ever retire from these cases,
but they’re not going to change anything,” he told me. I couldn’t
help thinking that he meant changing things in the larger sense. Pine
Ridge is one of the poorest Indian reservations in the country, with
a per capita income of about $4,000 and an unemployment rate of 80 to
90 percent. Then Two Elk got on the subject of his own family: a
child addicted to drugs; a sister killed in a car crash (for which he
blamed AIM); a daughter and a niece molested by his brother, who went
to prison. Each story was sadder than the last.
“It’s
just something that I had to eat,” he said, shaking his head. “And
so my point is, I told Rod Oswald that Anna Mae’s daughters —
maybe they can simply be thankful for what they’ve been able to
achieve, because they found the killers, or some of them. That’s a
lot more than what 99 percent of us get. When you hear about Ray
Robinson, lots of Indians might have something just as bad. And so
you think, Is it really fair he’s getting all the devotion?”
Aquash’s
daughters are not at all satisfied with that. “The people who had
my mother killed are still out there, calling themselves defenders of
Indian rights and saying her death was a tragedy,” Denise Maloney,
her older daughter, told me. She was 11 and her sister 9 the last
time they saw their mother. “But I remember her gait, how her hip
flicked when she walked. She smelled like Kool menthols.”
Dennis
Banks lives at the end of a long reservation road on the shore of
Leech Lake, Minn., in an A-frame house not far from his childhood
home. In his driveway sits a dismantled tour bus painted with his
name and a giant headdress. One morning in October, I found him in
the living room, in fleece pants and rafting shoes. He was drinking
tea. He was 76, barrel-chested and slim, and his hair was held in a
ponytail by a fuzzy elastic band.
He
put tobacco in a three-foot pipe, slowly took several puffs and then
handed it to me. “It tends to put visitors at ease,” he said. He
began talking about the business he runs with one of his sons — he
has 20 children with seven women, and 89 grandchildren — tapping
maple trees and harvesting wild rice. “These were trades I learned
when I was 4 years old,” he said.
Accusations
that he was involved in Aquash’s murder have swirled for years,
Banks acknowledged. He has always denied them. “I only know what I
read in the paper.” He said he was happy for the opportunity to
think about her.
“We
were in love,” he said. On the other hand, “Ka-Mook was very
strong, and she was brave enough to come with me, but — —”
“My
mom chose her own path to travel,” said their daughter Tiopa, who
was changing the diaper on her 4-month-old. “She has to live with
that.”
“When
I found out what Ka-Mook did, I felt very alone,” Banks said. “Not
so much anger, but ‘Is Dennis Banks the big Cracker Jack prize?’
”
He
talked about informers. “There was a lot going on that made the
paranoia believable,” he said. “It became impossible to trust
anybody.”
Even
so, I asked, would he have advocated killing someone who he knew for
certain was a traitor to AIM? (There has never been any evidence that
Aquash was an F.B.I. informer.)
Continue
reading the main story
Continue
reading the main story
“I
don’t know if I would participate in some sort of
getting-rid-of-the-person,” he said. “But I would say, ‘Take
care of this.’ Or, ‘Take the guy out, and I don’t want to see
him again.’ ”
I
brought up the Ray Robinson disappearance. Banks stared at me and
said nothing while he opened the screen door. He wanted to show me a
sweat lodge he built in his back yard, a low, stone igloo with tarps
and blankets for a roof.
“The
government asked me about that, and I told them I don’t know
anything,” he said finally. “There’s a lot of misinformation.”
He
turned toward his house, and we walked back inside. “However these
people got put up to putting the bullet in Annie Mae, I already know
all I need to,” he said. “The government set the stage for
anybody in the movement to think that Annie Mae was a fed when the
judge let her out of jail for the last time in Pierre.” He
retrieved a fly swatter from the kitchen, began flicking at the air
and went on: “There are no secrets and questions left. If there’s
a burning house, no one gives an order to put out the fire. Someone
just goes and does it. It was people who fell into an idea.”
Eric
Konigsberg is a former reporter for The Times and the author of
“Blood Relation.” He has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic
and New York.
Editor:
Sheila Glaser
