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True story inspires book By BILL VARBLE Posted Nov 19, 1999 at 2:00 AM Updated Dec 17, 2010 at 1:22 AM AIM activist slain near Wounded Knee — — There are two whispers about Anna Mae Pictou Aquash. One, she was killed by federal agents. Two, she was a snitch, killed by members of the radical American Indian Movement. Who Would Unbraid Her Hair: the legend of annie mae, (Anam Cara Press, $21) by Antoinette Claypoole, is the story of an American Indian activist who was murdered at age 30 in the winter of 1975-1976 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Claypoole, of Ashland, plans a reading for 7:30 tonight at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland. She timed the reading to tie in with the national campaign for presidential clemency for Leonard Peltier, an activist with the American Indian Movement who remains imprisoned for the murder of two FBI agents in 1975. The book is a combination of prose and poetry based on the life of Aquash. Among Claypoole's sources is Robert Pictou-Branscombe, a cousin of Aquash who investigated her murder. Aquash was a founder of AIM, many of whose members were shot or arrested during hostilities between Indians and federal agents on the reservation during a period of tension in the 1970s that included the occupation of Wounded Knee, S.D. She was executed between December of 1975 and February of 1976, Poole says. She was found in a ravine on Pine Ridge with a bullet in the back of her head. Aquash was a member of the Micmac tribe who left her native Nova Scotia to work with Indian children in Boston, Mass. After meeting AIM leaders and becoming sympathetic to their cause, she went to South Dakota and took part in highly publicized confrontations at Wounded Knee. An initial autopsy failed to discover the bullet wound in her head and returned a verdict of death by exposure, and Aquash was buried as a Jane Doe. The body was exhumed at the request of relatives and the execution-style wound discovered. In her last letter to her sisters, she had written: I'm Indian all the way, and always will be. I'm not going to stop fighting until I die, and I hope I'm a good example of a human being and my tribe. Although Claypoole never met Aquash, the two knew many of the same people. Years later, as she worked around Indians such as musician/activist John Trudell and the Big Mountain Support Network in Arizona, Claypoole noticed the name of Anna Mae coming up over and over. In the middle 1980s a Navajo woman Claypoole was working alongside named a place Camp Anna Mae. It stayed with me, Claypoole says. Then a few years ago some Indians charged that Aquash was a spy for federal agents, a charge Claypoole doesn't believe. I thought we needed to honor her, Claypoole says. Although Aquash took part in acts of civil disobedience with Peltier, she wasn't with him on June 26, 1975, when shooting broke out on private property at Wounded Knee when two FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ron Williams, tried to arrest a young Indian man near an encampment of AIM supporters. The shootout left Coler, Williams and an Indian man named Joe Stuntz dead. Peltier was convicted of murder in a case that has generated fierce controversy ever since. A defense committee seeking clemency counts Archbishop Desmond Tutu among its supporters. The FBI maintains that Peltier is responsible for the execution-style slayings of the two FBI men and belongs in prison. The case of Anna Mae Aquash has been reopened in part because of testimony by AIM activist Russell Means. For more on Claypoole and Anna Mae, see Claypoole, 48, teaches writing at Rogue Community College in Grants Pass. She grew up an Army brat, earned a bachelor's degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1973 and is completing a master's of fine arts in creative writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles. She says her interest in American Indian issues was sparked 18 years ago when a Modoc man named Al Smith in Coos Bay helped her in overcoming drug and drinking problems. He'd been sober 20 years and was one of the first to use the sweat lodge in detox, she says. You couldn't have a drink for three days before going in. It turned my life around. 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