ANNA MAE AQUASH 39/WEDDING AT WOUNDED KNEE/FAKE MEDICINE WOMAN

All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.

Here is another poem by Monica Charles

WOUNDED KNEE 1973 #6

We had to empty our pockets of knives
Lighters, flashlights, all things unnatural
To enter the world of our grandfathers
An ethereal place where dreams and songs
are the language spoken by Spirit
They wrapped and bound Crow Dog in a star quilt
and laid him face down on the cold hard floor
All light was blacked out forcing us inward
The Spirits prophesied, preached like grampa
Our starving souls, baby birds, open mouths
for food foraged by our eagle mother
Drums, rattles, birds, deer, little points of light
whirred past like the rings of a hoop dancer
We spent the night in the realm of Spirit
Lost children finding our way home at last

..not everyone at wounded Knee liked Pictou. Her friend Mary Moore (later Mary Crow Dog, wife of Leonard) wrote that Pictou fought with a group of women called the…..

Moore wrote of the Patrol, “They were loud-mouth city women, very media conscious, hugging the limelight. they were bossy, too, trying to order us around (and) getting all the credit and glory while we did the shit work, scrubbing dishes or making sleeping bags out of old jackets. Annie Mae gave these women a piece of her mind and I took her side.” Moore was too hard on the…..Many of the patrollers, like Madonna Gilbert, cousin to Russell Means, and Lorelei DeCora Means, wife of Russell’s brother Ted, did great amounts of work in the shadow of their more famous male relatives. But Moore was right that the patrollers did not like Pictou. Probably they resented that she was less retiring in front of the men, that she was toting a weapon and"manning" a bunker, and so on.

A few weeks after Anna Mae and Nogeeshik arrived at Wounded Knee, Mary Moore delivered herself a son, whom she named Pedro for her friend Pedro Bissonette. Pictou was one of the midwives. The next day, Anna Mae and Nogeeshik were wed before the citizens of the Independent Oglala Nation.

On April 25, a few days after Frank Clearwater was killed and a few days before Buddy Lamont would be, they walked out of the new nation and into the welcoming embrace of the BIA police. The police took them to the town of Kyle, north of Wounded Knee, where they were charged with breaking Dick Wilson’s law that banned three or more people from gathering inn one place. the next morning ” Annie Mae Aquash” and her husband were interviewed briefly-whether by the FBI or BIA is unclear-and released. Her interview lasted sixteen minutes, an indication of how unimportant she was to authorities. this would soon change.