In 1973, rookie NPR reporter Kevin McKiernan became the only journalist to defy an FBI-imposed media blackout and embed himself with the members of the American Indian Movement who had taken over the historic village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock tells the story of that 71-day armed occupation through the voices of both the AIM members and FBI agents who lived it and shows how this event continues to reverberate through Native American-US government relations, up through the movement at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Forty years after Wounded Knee, McKiernan meets a Yurok fisherman in California whom he had unwittingly photographed during the 10-week occupation, Willard Carlson. Becoming friends, the two men travel back to the Dakotas and then to the pipeline protests on the Standing Rock reservation where they begin to examine the legacy of 1970s activism by Native Americans. Meanwhile, McKiernan also launches a new investigation into the murder of his former roommate, Annie Mae Aquash, a Mi'kmaq Native from Nova Scotia who took part in the Wounded Knee uprising and finds himself butting heads with the FBI again over their alleged practice of "snitch-jacketing" the Canadian woman as an informer. The story takes another unsettling turn when McKiernan confronts the founders of the Indian movement with alleged ties to her killing, a decision that threatens to undermine his status as a trusted outsider.
|
