Aquash's Murder: Hermeneutical and Post-Modern Legal Analysis in Light of the Murder of Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash
Aquash's Murder begins as a cruel South Dakota winter thawed toward the end of February 1976, when a rancher on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation discovered the frostbitten corpse of a Jane Doe at the bottom of a 30-foot cliff, 100 feet from a state highway. An autopsy determined she had died of exposure, while the FBI sent her severed hands to Washington for analysis. Weeks later, a match of fingerprints to feisty American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash led to exhumation and another autopsy, this time revealing that she had been shot in the head. Those sympathetic to AIM assumed hers was simply one of nearly 200 unsolved murders during an era when the Reservation was held secretly under martial law, now known as "the Reign of Terror." Months before Aquash's murder, a deadly gun battle between AIM members and two young FBI agents forced her to flee with her friend and fellow agitator Leonard Peltier. Although Peltier always denied FBI claims that he was the one who delivered coup de grâce shots to the agents, he was eventually convicted of double murder. This prompted unsuccessful popular movements for a Presidential pardon while inept lies from both sides helped stalemate any legal or political solution.
For the past half century, many things have contributed to the lingering controversies surrounding Aquash's murder and Peltier's pardon. During this time, clumsy stories and explanations designed to deny the legal system's impropriety appear in unrelated court cases (including of those convicted of her murder), not to mention popular culture.
Among my many unexpected discoveries in law school, a few adventurous jurists were trying to adapt the word "postmodernism" to law (usually spelled by them without a hyphen and in lowercase). A class in Federal Indian Law found me especially perusing a string of articles by legal postmodernists emphasizing contradictory policies discriminating both for and against the Indians; treaties deliberately designed to be breached; attempts to assimilate Indians to white culture while claiming to democratize them at the same time; Federal laws enacted overtly swindling Reservations out of land and mineral rights; and an ongoing "Discovery doctrine" planted into American Law more than 200 years ago that arbitrarily justifies inferior status of property rights for Indians. In the dense muck of systematic confusion and unintentional contradictions, bigotry far removed from any notion of Age of Enlightenment continues to growl and snarl. Legal postmodernists invoke a conceptual lion tamer so we all might avoid sharp fangs and long claws.
Connecting Aquash's strangely prosecuted murder with postmodern law represents a "Hail-Mary pass" for a lot of things, mostly as commentary on an American legal system too often getting it wrong. Legal systems should settle controversies and disputes, but Aquash's murder remains an unsolved mystery. I include a chapter on basic legal hermeneutics as a stepping stone. The resulting broad-stroked triptych (the murder, hermeneutics, and postmodernism) challenges any reader to find and endorse better solutions than American law has provided in this case.
My sincere thanks to Barry Bachrach for writing a foreword to this book. He served as Peltier's lawyer and agrees that the legal pursuit against Aquash's murderers became an attempt to further incriminate his client.
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TrineDay ISBN 9781634244503
March 22, 2024