Aquash's Murder: Hermeneutical and Post-Modern Legal Analysis in Light of the Murder of Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash

As the cruel South Dakota winter thawed toward the end of February 1976, 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...