Seven Oaks Magazine.

Anna Mae Pictou Aquash could have been one of the greatest native leaders of her generation. Instead, this Nova Scotia-born mother and devoted activist for the American Indian Movement (AIM) was led to a quiet corner of South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975 and shot in the back of the head. She tumbled off of a cliff, landing in a field where she lay for hours, possibly days, until the brutal Dakota winter claimed her. Her murder remained unsolved for years but members of the FBI are now convinced that another former AIM member, Yukon native John Graham, is responsible, and they are now asking for his extradition. For a reporter trying to peer into the dim history of the case it seems most logical to assume that there are two John Grahams. The first is a loving father and committed native activist who in the early 1980s named an activist camp after his slain friend Anna Mae. The other is a violent AIM loyalist who, tainted by the paranoia of FBI infiltration, followed orders to kidnap and kill Anna Mae on the mistaken belief that she was an informant. Graham remains under house arrest in Vancouver and soon a Canadian judge will have to decide which view of the man is the closest to the truth.

Anna Mae’s execution was not the last indignity visited upon her. Shortly after a rancher discovered her body in 1976 her hands were cut off by pathologist W.O. Brown and shipped to Washington; her body was then buried in an unmarked grave. Graham’s defenders often allude to that desecration because, they believe, members of the FBI were trying to hide their own involvement in Anna Mae’s death.

“They had her hands cut off and shipped in a jar of formaldehyde to Washington to be identified rather than send the body for a full scale autopsy,” said Mathew Lien, who heads up Graham’s defense committee. “Her family demanded another autopsy and when her body was exhumed the second autopsy immediately found the bullet in the cheekbone, the bullet hole in the back of the head, the blood stains on the front of the jacket and it made the FBI look…very strange. It made them look like they were involved in a cover-up.”

Paul DeMains, a reporter investigating the death of Anna Mae for the last decade, knows the case well and is capable of throwing out names and dates at a rapid fire pace. He is convinced that John Graham is guilty and he rejects claims that the FBI is responsible.

“This whole idea that the FBI was covering up things, I think, is smoke and mirrors,” he said from his office in Wisconsin. “You’ll never convince me that the FBI wasn’t involved in dirty deeds at Pine Ridge or that Christopher Columbus didn’t slay Native Americans, but those things begin to draw attention away from the case. W.O. Brown was a sloppy, incompetent pathologist who simply didn’t find the bullet wound (during the first autopsy). But if the FBI wanted to cover some involvement in her case they didn’t even need to identify the fingerprints of Anna Mae.”

The final days of Anna Mae’s life were spent running from police back to the friends she trusted most. The authorities were cracking down hard on AIM members by 1975. In June of that year two FBI agents were killed at Pine Ridge, a crime that AIM member Leonard Peltier was eventually convicted of and sentenced to death. In November, Anna Mae was traveling with Peltier and other members of the AIM leadership when she was arrested and jailed in South Dakota. She was released and told to appear in court the next day. She never did. Instead she fled to Denver to the house of a friend and AIM member Troy Lynn Yellowwood. She then left, or was taken, from that house back to South Dakota and, ultimately, to her death.

Arlo Looking Cloud, Graham’s co-accused, was convicted of Anna Mae’s murder in February of this year in part because of a taped confession obtained by police in 2003. In that tape a drunken Looking Cloud admits to police that he, Graham and Theda Clark drove Anna Mae back to Pine Ridge. It was there, according to Looking Cloud, that Graham took Anna Mae to the top of a hill and executed her.

“From what I heard of that tape it was the state, again, pointing the finger. I think Arlo was just too out of it.” Graham said from a friend’s house in Vancouver. “I know their history in this case. It’s been flawed right from the start and manipulated and maneuvered by the FBI through the courts and through the system.”

Those that believe Graham is guilty also say he was not the one who decided Anna Mae had to die. Those orders are alleged to have come from the very top of the AIM leadership, whipped into a violent paranoia by the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO. The counter intelligence program, which has been extensively investigated by former AIM member Ward Churchill, had been officially disbanded by 1971 but many, including Churchill, believe its members were deeply involved in the infiltration of AIM during the mid-70’s and were responsible for “bad-jacketing” Anna Mae; a technique of making it appear she was a traitor in order to take heat off the real informants. At Arlo Looking Cloud’s trial an FBI agent admitted they had developed informants within AIM but Anna Mae was not one of them.

The FBI’s long history of infiltrating and destroying groups like the Black Panthers and AIM has bred a near-pathological distrust of the authorities among many current and former members of the American Indian Movement. At Leonard Peltier’s extradition hearing in 1976 the FBI used testimony from a mentally disabled woman, who later recanted her claims, to secure his transfer from Canada to the United States. That drew condemnation from human rights organizations like Amnesty International, who are now urging caution in the John Graham case.

“All this has led us to raise the concern that Canada pay very close attention to any evidence that is submitted by the US for the extradition of John Graham and we’ll be urging US authorities, as well, that his right to a fair trial be scrupulously upheld,” said Amnesty’s Crag Benjamin, who echoes Graham’s fear of the American courts.

“I don’t see a future if I’m extradited. There’s no justice there. You go from Arlo’s case all the way back to them trying to implicate AIM, trying to implicate Leonard and paying informants to do it. That’s not justice,” Graham said.

Paul DeMains, who writes for News from Indian Country and still has family members in AIM, agrees that the FBI used dubious techniques to secure Peltier’s extradition. That does not, he says, mean either Peltier or Graham are innocent of the crimes they are accused of.

“We’re talking about the murder of a native mother. We’re talking about members of the American Indian Movement themselves who are coming forward to say: ‘Here’s what happened. We’re not happy with how that feels. It’s been baggage that’s been sitting around for a long time’ and John Graham has been the person named most often in this case,” Demains said.

Graham is still waiting for a date to be set for his extradition hearing. That’s expected to be announced in the near future.