Trial to revisit American Indian Movement's past

The American Indian Movement grabbed headlines and international attention in the early 1970s when the group occupied the South Dakota reservation town of Wounded Knee. Those days are long past. AIM has since faded from public view, though some of its offshoot groups still operate. But the upcoming trial of a former AIM member in the late 1975 murder of Annie Mae Aquash - who left her two young daughters to join AIM at Wounded Knee - will likely revisit AIM's past and the actions of its former leaders. Prosecutors say AIM leaders ordered Aquash's death because she was suspected of being a government informant at a time when FBI agents and AIM members routinely exchanged gunfire. John Graham, a Canadian accused of shooting Aquash, is scheduled to stand trial this week. In the years since her death, one AIM leader, Russell Means, has blamed another, Vernon Bellecourt, for issuing that order. Bellecourt denied the claim before his death in 2008. Aquash, a native of the Mi'kmaq tribe of Nova Scotia, took part in Wounded Knee and remained active within the group afterward. But rumors began to circulate that Aquash might be a government informant, particularly as she became more involved within AIM, witnesses have said. She was killed in late 1975, two years after the Wounded Knee uprising. A rancher found her body in February 1976. AIM splintered in the 1980s due to infighting between Means and other AIM leaders, according to Northern Arizona University professor Jon Reyhner. Vernon Bellecourt and his brother, Clyde Bellecourt, led one faction, the American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council, and Means led another, the American Indian Movement of Colorado...more