Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash.
Her heart is buried at Wounded Knee.
With the extradition of John Graham to the US to stand trial for the murder of Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, a sad and brutal chapter from the violence-plagued American Indian Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s will come to a conclusion. Arlo Looking-Cloud, another member of the American Indian Movemrnt, was convicted of Pictou-Aquash's murder in 2003.
Pictou-Aquash was a rough-edged, idealistic, angry young Mi'kmaq who decided to put her beliefs into action, and paid the ultimate price. She was involved in two major events in the early 1970s, the Trail of Broken Treaties March on Washington, D.C., and the Wounded Knee Occupation on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. She became the target of an FBI investigation, and was a victim of what is widely believed to be an FBI-sanctioned execution.
It's a shame that so few people seem to grasp the impact Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash made during her short, harsh life. She escaped the spiritual and economic poverty that was the reality of life in Indian Brook, Nova Scotia, moved to Maine to find work, and became a tireless crusader. She fought for the rights of Native American and Aboriginal Canadian children and women, became an educator and a tireless and very vocal critic of the the systemic abuse of all North American natives.
Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash died of a bullet wound to the head. Her hands were cut off to make identification of her remains more difficult. Her body was left at Wounded Knee, where it was discovered years after her murder.
Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash was a hero. She saw injustice and did what she could to eradicate it. She saw herself as a warrior, a defender of her people, and she gave her all.
We should all be so committed to fighting for what we know is right.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
~ Buffy Sainte-Marie ~
Indian legislation on the desk of a do-right Congressman
Now, he don't know much about the issues
so he picks up the phone and he asks advice from the Senator out in Indian country
A darling of the energy companies
who are ripping off what’s left of the reservations.
I learned a safety rule
I don’t know who to thank
Don't stand between the reservation and the corporate bank
They send in federal tanks
It isn’t nice but it’s reality.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
They got these energy companies that want the land
and they’ve got churches by the dozen who want to guide our hands
and sign Mother Earth over to pollution, war and greed
Get rich... get rich quick.
We got the federal marshals
We got the covert spies
We got the liars by the fire
We got the FBIs
They lie in court and get nailedand still Peltier goes off to jail
My girlfriend Anna Mae talked about uranium
Her head was filled with bullets and her body dumped
The FBI cut off her hands and told us she’d died of exposure
Yeah Right!
We had the Goldrush Wars
Aw, didn’t we learn to crawl
and still our history gets written in a liar’s scrawl
They tell ‘ya “Honey, you can still be an Indiand-down at the ‘Y’on Saturday nights"
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
With the extradition of John Graham to the US to stand trial for the murder of Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, a sad and brutal chapter from the violence-plagued American Indian Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s will come to a conclusion. Arlo Looking-Cloud, another member of the American Indian Movemrnt, was convicted of Pictou-Aquash's murder in 2003.
Pictou-Aquash was a rough-edged, idealistic, angry young Mi'kmaq who decided to put her beliefs into action, and paid the ultimate price. She was involved in two major events in the early 1970s, the Trail of Broken Treaties March on Washington, D.C., and the Wounded Knee Occupation on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. She became the target of an FBI investigation, and was a victim of what is widely believed to be an FBI-sanctioned execution.
It's a shame that so few people seem to grasp the impact Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash made during her short, harsh life. She escaped the spiritual and economic poverty that was the reality of life in Indian Brook, Nova Scotia, moved to Maine to find work, and became a tireless crusader. She fought for the rights of Native American and Aboriginal Canadian children and women, became an educator and a tireless and very vocal critic of the the systemic abuse of all North American natives.
Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash died of a bullet wound to the head. Her hands were cut off to make identification of her remains more difficult. Her body was left at Wounded Knee, where it was discovered years after her murder.
Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash was a hero. She saw injustice and did what she could to eradicate it. She saw herself as a warrior, a defender of her people, and she gave her all.
We should all be so committed to fighting for what we know is right.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
~ Buffy Sainte-Marie ~
Indian legislation on the desk of a do-right Congressman
Now, he don't know much about the issues
so he picks up the phone and he asks advice from the Senator out in Indian country
A darling of the energy companies
who are ripping off what’s left of the reservations.
I learned a safety rule
I don’t know who to thank
Don't stand between the reservation and the corporate bank
They send in federal tanks
It isn’t nice but it’s reality.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
They got these energy companies that want the land
and they’ve got churches by the dozen who want to guide our hands
and sign Mother Earth over to pollution, war and greed
Get rich... get rich quick.
We got the federal marshals
We got the covert spies
We got the liars by the fire
We got the FBIs
They lie in court and get nailedand still Peltier goes off to jail
My girlfriend Anna Mae talked about uranium
Her head was filled with bullets and her body dumped
The FBI cut off her hands and told us she’d died of exposure
Yeah Right!
We had the Goldrush Wars
Aw, didn’t we learn to crawl
and still our history gets written in a liar’s scrawl
They tell ‘ya “Honey, you can still be an Indiand-down at the ‘Y’on Saturday nights"
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
posted by Alphamutt at 1:39 AM
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