The unsolved 1975 murder of a young Mi’kmaq woman is coming back to haunt the FBI and the American Indian Movement.

The murder of Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash has been the subject of rumours and debate in AIM circles for nearly 25 years.

Aquash was a key AIM member. She was one of the few armed women at AIM’s 1972 standoff with U.S. government authorities at Wounded Knee. She acted as a courier slipping in and out of the beseiged area, and got married at the standoff in a traditional ceremony.

Aquash was also one of the first AIM members to suspect a fellow member, Douglass Durham, was actually an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

At the time, the FBI targeted AIM and other U.S. political groups like the Black Panther Party with a secret program called CO-INTELPRO. The FBI used covert agents to undermine political movements with disruptive tactics, violence and by sowing mistrust.

Just before Aquash’s death, she reportedly had plans to release information on another FBI agent inside AIM – this one a prominent AIM leader.

She never had the chance. At the same time, a rumour suddenly started that Aquash herself was an FBI plant. By this point, AIM members were so paranoid about FBI informants that the rumour was Aquash’s death warrant.

Today, many AIM members say Aquash was set up by the very person she wanted to expose, who is still a prominent AIM leader.

Last month, the question of who killed Aquash exploded into the public eye when AIM leaders Russell Means and Ward Churchill held a press conference in Denver about the case, accompanied by Robert Pictou-Branscombe, a cousin of Aquash.

Churchill (an occasional contributor to The Nation) said Aquash was the victim of a covert FBI tactic known as “snitch-jacketing” or “bad-jacketing.’’ He said Aquash was falsely accused of being a federal agent.

Pictou-Branscombe named three people who allegedly took Aquash to a ravine bordering the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, where she was allegedly shot in the back of the head.

Means said he came forward because one of the three people told him who ordered the killing. “If AIM is the perpetuator of this grisly murder, in collusion with the FBI, then I want it brought out,” he said.

Means said the names have been turned over to federal authorities. Also at the press conference, brothers Vernon and Clyde Bellecourt, founding members of AIM, were named as FBI informants, according to a story in Indian Country Today.

The Bellecourts have been feuding with Means, Churchill and other AIM members for years, and even started a rival organization called the National American Indian Movement Inc. Vernon Bellecourt told Indian Country Today that Means and Churchill are the real informants, not him.

The two rival AIM factions do agree on one thing: The FBI doesn’t want to arrest anyone because this would expose its covert operations.