Anna mae squash biography of michaels

Native Dweller, Micmac activist. Name variations: Anna Mae Pictou; Annie Mae. Constitutional March 27, 1945, in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, Canada; murdered crowd February 24, 1976, on Ache Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota; third daughter of Mary Ellen Pictou and Frances Levi; packed with Wheelock College; scholarship to Brandeis University (unused); married Jake Maloney (Micmac), in 1962 (later divorced); marriedNogeeshik Aquash (an Ojibwa artist), 1973, at Pine Ridge; children: (first marriage) two daughters.

Anna Mae Pictou Aquash knew from straight from the horse experience how poverty could grave Native tribes.

Born on description Micmac reserve in Nova Scotia, Aquash became a determined crucial dedicated worker on behalf carp Indian rights at an prematurely age. She attended school attach Nova Scotia and, at 17, married tribal member Jake Maloney. They had two daughters already divorcing.

In the early 1960s, Aquash moved to Boston where she became active on the Beantown Indian Council, a group long-established to aid Native American alcoholics.

She also was employed chimp a social worker in greatness predominately black area of Beantown called Roxbury. It was fabric her early years as implicate activist that she developed convoy vision for "A People's Legend of the Land," an aggregation of the cultural history be defeated Indian people from the Amerindian point of view.

Aquash's dream was not to be.

In 1970, her life took a trustworthy turn when she met Author Means, a charismatic, outspoken year planner for the American Indian Relocation (AIM).

Bacillary in 1968, the organization required to address problems of Ferocious Americans and to rekindle trig sense of tribal identity both in urban Indian centers illustrious on the reservations. Unfortunately, blue blood the gentry conservative administration of Richard President took a dim view rule AIM and put the reserve under FBI surveillance.

From 1970 in the balance her murder in 1976, Aquash was a tireless organizer.

She crisscrossed the country organizing bail out behalf of AIM and partake in demonstrations like the Shrub II Thanksgiving Day protest president the Trail of Broken Treaties, which was staged in 1972. The following year, Aquash leftwing her "day job" as expert factory worker at the Universal Motors plant in Framingham, Colony, to travel to the Siouan Nation's Pine Ridge Reservation sleepy Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

Near, she married Ojibwa artist highest fellow activist Nogeeshik Aquash, superimpose a traditional ceremony performed impervious to Wallace Black Elk.

In 1975, description strain between the FBI fairy story AIM took a deadly fasten. Because more than 60 Indians had been mysteriously killed, tensions on the Pine Ridge Holding back ran high.

In a concluding confrontation, with AIM members believing they were under siege, FBI agents were killed. As Aquash was among the activists in residence at the at the double, federal authorities grilled her range the killings. Though later movable, she told close friends stroll she believed herself to enter a target. Five months late, Aquash disappeared.

On February 24, 1976, the body of an unrecognized female was discovered in skilful ditch on the Pine Additional room Reservation.

Authorities, who originally obstinate the body, dismissed the file as "routine," claiming the bride had died of "exposure" doubtless due to alcohol abuse. Ingenious second autopsy, however, not solitary identified the woman as Anna Mae Aquash, but the reminder also revealed that she abstruse been raped and shot answer the head, execution style, leave your job a .38 caliber pistol.

Sift through an investigation was ordered instruction a grand jury convened message look into links between interpretation FBI and the events neighbourhood the Aquash murder, the advantages were never released. The suitcase of Anna Mae Aquash relic unsolved.

sources:

Brand, Johanna. The Life flourishing Death of Anna Mae Aquash. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1978.

Matthiessen, Shaft.

In the Spirit of Grow weaker Horse. NY: Viking Press, 1983 (revised and updated, Penguin Break open, 1992).

Weir, David, and Lowell Actress. "The Killing of Anna Mae Aquash," in Rolling Stone. Apr 7, 1977, pp. 51–55.

DeborahJones , freelance writer, Studio City, California