Vow of Silence: The Assassination of Annie Mae is a five-part docuseries, directed by Yvonne Russo, that examines the 1975 death of Annie Mae Aquash, a member of the Mi’kmaq nation in Nova Scotia who became a prominent activist for the American Indian Movement in the early 1970s. There has been suspicions that her death had larger implications than just an isolated incident, and this docuseries takes a look at those suspicions.
Opening Shot: “SOUTH DAKOTA, 1975.” Thunder and lightning cracks. We hear a recording of Annie Mae Aquash in an interview where she talks about a disturbing visit she got from someone saying they were with the FBI.
The Gist: Through interviews with Annie Mae Aquash’s daughter, sister and ex-husband, as well as contemporary and archival interviews from members of the American Indian Movement organization, viewers get an idea of what the movement was about. In the early 1970s, a concerted effort was made by American Indians from various tribes to get the U.S. and Canadian governments to honor the treaties they had with Indigenous people in each nation’s early days.
Aquash’s life reflected just how Indigenous people were assimilated into the white world up until then. While their mother was with them, Aquash and her sister grew up on the land, but when their mother abandoned them, they were forced to live on a reservation, where Indigenous people had no rights.
She eventually moved to Boston in the early 1960s, where she met her husband and started a family. Both were solidly working class, dressing the part and leading an assimilated lifestyle. But in 1972, when she connected with other Indigenous people in Boston, she also became an active member of AIM. Annie Mae’s daughter Denise Pictou Maloney recalls in her interview how her hair and mode of dress almost immediately changed.
AIM and Annie Mae were on the FBI’s radar, especially after the organization had a sit-in at the office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, surreptitiously taking documents about corporations mining uranium on the land of sovereign Indian nations.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The style of Vow Of Silence is fairly straightforward, reminiscent of one of the many true crime docuseries Joe Berlinger has done, including the recent Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey.
Our Take: Vow Of Silence: The Assassination Of Annie Mae is a rarity in the true crime docuseries genre: A retelling of an old case that tells the viewer lots of things they didn’t know about the topic. The fight for Indigenous rights that started in the early 1970s is something we’ve seen hints of in scripted series like Dark Winds, but we didn’t quite get just how strong it was during that era, and the conditions the activists were trying to change.
It was a fight not only to get North American governments to simply honor the treaties they had with sovereign Indian nations early in those governments’ existences, but it was also part of a push for Native people who moved off reservations and into various cities to push back against how they were assimilated in the earlier parts of the 20th century.
Russo manages to get more than enough of the people who participated in AIM to talk to give the perspective of what that movement was like, given how much of the initial protests happened over 50 years ago. What’s even more impressive is all of the footage she incorporates of people from AIM who are no longer with us or refused to be interviewed. In one case, there’s both archival and contemporary footage of an AIM activist, and it’s good to see how his perspective has stayed pretty firm over the intervening half-century.
Russo takes her time to set up the scenario of Annie Mae’s death, and in this case it’s necessary. She needed to not only set up how she grew up and her lifelong disdain for reservations, which she deemed to be similar to concentration camps, but how she became one of the more prominent activists in the AIM movement. Russo also needed to not only show how the U.S. government blatantly went back on its early treaties with Indian nations by showing the country’s massive land theft through most of the 19th century, but the reason why federal agencies like BIA were protecting non-Native interests by the time AIM came to the fore.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Annie Mae talks to a journalist about the FBI’s threats against her in South Dakota, where she was participating in an occupation to block uranium mining. It’s the only known tape of her voice.
Sleeper Star: Denise Pictou Maloney has led the investigation to reexamine her mother’s death, which happened when she was around 10 and has traumatized her ever since.
Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing that we could think of.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Vow Of Silence: The Assassination Of Annie Mae is an informative docuseries about a member of the American Indian Movement and how the U.S. government continued to restrict Native communities even after grabbing most of their land.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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