Extradition gives hope for healing

By Journal Editorial Board | Wednesday, December 12, 2007

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After more than 30 years, the wounds that Anna Mae Aquash’s death caused in the Native American community have turned into scars.

The Dec. 6 decision by the Supreme Court of Canada to send the second man accused in her 1975 murder back to South Dakota to stand trial gives us hope that those scars can now  begin to fade.

John Graham, a Yukon native, has fought extradition from Canada ever since he was charged in 2003 with Aquash’s murder. Her body was found, shot in the head, on Feb. 24, 1976, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Another man, Fritz Arlo Looking Cloud, is already serving a life sentence in Aquash’s kidnapping and murder, but he has named Graham as the man who pulled the trigger. Government prosecutors say  the murder was ordered by American Indian Movement leaders because they believed Aquash was an FBI informant during the investigations into the June 1975 murders of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. AIM leaders deny involvement and blame the government for her death.

The deep divisions caused by the AIM occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 and the subsequent violence still reverberates within Native American communities. For Aquash’s family, the wounds are even deeper.

Aquash’s daughter, Denise Maloney Pictou of Halifax, Nova Scotia, was overwhelmed by the Supreme Court’s decision, but grateful for the closure it might offer.

“We were sitting on edge hoping and praying that it would be news in our favor so we could move on,� she told the Associated Press last week.

The scars from that time in  the state’s history will always  exist, but now that Graham’s guilt or innocence will be determined at trial, perhaps those old wounds borne by Aquash’s family, by  supporters of AIM and by the  entire Native community can  finally be salved with justice.

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