Tuesday, October 14, 2003|
Paul Krugman nails it again. For a glimpse into our future, visit fellow Salon blogger Miguel Octavio's The Devil's Excrement. 4:10:37 PM | The future's so bright we've got to wear shades, right? 
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S scolded me last night for not including the story of Anna Mae Aquash in yesterday's post. Since I've finally submitted my mid-term grades after days and days and DAYS of grading essays, I have the time to include it now. Of course, my brain is still horribly cluttered with grammar corrections and notes about thesis development, so you'll have to forgive me if this rambles a bit. 1:57:18 PM | Anna Mae, born in Canada, was a teacher and activist in South Dakota and elsewhere in the 1970s. She was a member of AIM, the American Indian Movement, an indigenous rights organization founded in Minnesota in the early 1970s. Leonard Peltier is their most well-known activist because of his ongoing incarceration for killing an FBI agent during a shoot-out in 1975. Go to the Free Peltier web site to learn more about this history and Peltier's ongoing fight to be released from prison. Peltier's voice is featured on Robbie Robertson's Contact from the Underworld of Redboy, where Peltier points out that the US prison system is the "fastest growing Indian reservation." (Real Live Preacher talked about the state of our prisons yesterday after he visited a cousin serving 5 years in a Texas prison. The comments are particularly interesting.) I warned you this would ramble a bit. Sorry. Back to Anna Mae. Anna Mae was found dead in a snow bank on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1976. Her death was attributed to exposure until the gun shot wound at the back of her head was discovered. The FBI cut off her hands and sent them to Quantico for "analysis." As you'd expect, her murderers were not identified, let alone caught. Until this year, that is. I did a search for Anna Mae on Google today to make sure I had her story straight for this post. This came up first. Here she is, the black and white photo faded in parts, the tint uneven. Anna Mae staring out from a "Seeking Information" poster on the FBI's Most Wanted website from THIS YEAR. Unbelievable. It has long been believed by AIM and other activists that the FBI was responsible in some way or another for Anna Mae's death. (Cutting off her hands and sending them to the FBI lab didn't exactly stop the rumors.) The FBI, too, was known to have their hands all over reservation business, which the Val Kilmer film Thunderheart dramatized. The uranium mining by private industry on reservation land, the gold and silver mines too, all made AIM suspicious that the FBI had more than law and order in mind when they cracked down on activists. Though the reservations were technically autonomous, the FBI had (and I presume still has) power over the tribal police and the government. If a murder happened on the reservation, the FBI had jurisdiction. The FBI was, to AIM and other activists, the enemy. Read anything about 1970s Indian America and it makes sense. Between murders, abductions, and imprisonments, it's not hard to see how their antagonistic relationship developed into a war of sorts. You can imagine that it felt like a horrible afront to Anna Mae's memory, then, to see her face on the FBI's page, especially since the poster's implication is that the bureau had nothing at all to do with her murder. I couldn't help but ask, Was it the Canadian government who pressured the FBI to re-open this case? Is there actual pressure on them now to address this murder, and if so, is this "Seeking Information" poster a way to deflect from the truth? Then I returned to the Google search and found this. It seems the FBI has found its man. It's amazing how little changes, except the number of men in the "fastest growing Indian reservation in the United States." I'll follow this story and post updates as I learn them. As I said in yesterday's post, I first read about Anna Mae in Joy Harjo's poetry. You can read the poem here. If you get a chance to see Joy perform the poem with her band, I strongly suggest going. It's also available on her album, "Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century." It's an incredibly moving piece.
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Last update: 8/24/05; 7:06:30 PM .
