workingclasshistory:

On this day, 27 March 1945, First Nations activist Annie Mae Aquash (Naguset Eask in Mi'kmaq) was born in Nova Scotia, Canada. Moving to the US in the 1960s, she became heavily involved in Native American activism. She once wrote to her sister: “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.” She joined the American Indian Movement and took part in the armed occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. On her first night there she was told by a male AIM leader that she was needed on kitchen duty. She replied “I didn’t come here to wash dishes. I came here to fight.” Tragically, she was found dead in early 1976. The first autopsy stated she “died from frost”, then her hands were cut off and sent to the FBI for fingerprinting while her body was buried anonymously as a “Jane Doe”. Soon after, however, AIM and her family arranged for a second autopsy which found a bullet in the back of her head. Decades later, a couple of AIM members admitted that she had been killed by some members of the group after being falsely labelled an FBI informant. The FBI had heavily infiltrated AIM as part of its COINTELPRO operation, and had sowed discontent and murder within radical organisations. https://ift.tt/2CGDFlb