Nearly 35 years after Canadian aboriginal activist Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash was gunned down in an execution-style murder in the South Dakota badlands, Vancouver resident John Graham was sentenced Monday to life in prison.
The sentence comes after the jury at the murder trial convicted him of felony murder Dec. 10. Still, Graham maintained his innocence until the end, according to the Rapid City Journal, a daily newspaper in the South Dakota city where Graham was being held. Graham’s lawyer, John Murphy, said he will appeal the conviction and sentence, extending the already lengthy process. Last year’s highly anticipated trial followed a long extradition battle by Graham in Canada and years of legal wrangling in the U.S. courts. The entire case rose from one of the most sensational episodes in Native American history. In the early 1970s, Pictou-Aquash, a young Mi’kmaq from Nova Scotia, and Graham, a Southern Tsimshian originally from Yukon, drifted south and joined the American Indian Movement (AIM) and its high-profile occupation of the village of Wounded Knee, S.D. The village is an important, historic symbol for American aboriginals, the site of a massacre of Sioux tribespeople by the U.S. Cavalry in 1890. In 1973, armed AIM activists took control of the town to protest a variety of native grievances. A 71-day standoff ensued, leaving several people dead on both sides and sparking an explosion of violence that lasted several years on the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation. By 1975, Pictou-Aquash, under suspicion of being an FBI informant, had left AIM and moved to Denver. According to prosecution documents filed in the Graham case, AIM leaders are alleged to have ordered Graham and two other followers to kidnap Pictou-Aquash and bring her back to Pine Ridge. Prosecutors say she was tied up, driven north, and raped and interrogated for several days. Finally one morning at sunrise, prosecutors say, three AIM enforcers — Graham, plus Americans Arlo Looking Cloud and Theda Clark — drove Pictou-Aquash to the edge of a ravine on the reservation. "Aquash begged to go free," say prosecution documents. "She was crying and praying for her kids, and begging them not to do this. . . . Looking Cloud and Graham marched Aquash up a hill and Graham shot her at the top of a cliff. Her body was either thrown, or it tumbled to the bottom." Pictou-Aquash’s partly decomposed body was found by a rancher in 1976. A sloppy initial autopsy said the unidentified woman had died of exposure, and she was buried in an anonymous grave — but not before FBI agents had cut off her hands and sent them to a lab in Washington. Fingerprint experts identified the woman as Pictou-Aquash. Her body was exhumed and a second autopsy revealed that the cause of death was a close-range gun shot to the back of the head. Still, the case lay dormant for years, during which time AIM’s leaders claimed the FBI had murdered Pictou-Aquash. Then in the late 1990s, a handful of former AIM members began talking about the crime. In 2001, Looking Cloud and Graham were indicted for first-degree murder. Looking Cloud was convicted in 2004 of "aiding and abetting" Pictou-Aquash’s murder, and is now serving a life sentence. Paul DeMain, the managing editor of News from Indian Country, a Wisconsin-based native newspaper that has investigated the affair, says Looking Cloud and Graham were not the key figures in the crime. "They are like the Watergate burglars, breaking into the Democratic committee office to do the dirty work," he said. © Copyright (c) Postmedia News -- http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Vancouver+gets+life+prison+1975+murder+aboriginal+activist/4160091/story.html Via InstaFetch -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
