RAPID CITY, S.D., Feb. 4 — The former companion of a leader in the American Indian Movement clutched a single feather as she took the witness stand in a federal court here on Wednesday and tearfully depicted the movement's leaders as murderous.

In a full but silent courtroom, the witness, Ka-Mook Nichols, said leaders of the militant Indian civil-rights group known as AIM had orchestrated the death of one of its own members, Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, nearly three decades ago. And Ms. Nichols implicated Leonard Peltier, AIM's best-known member, in the earlier killing of two federal agents, crimes for which Mr. Peltier has been sent to prison for life.

Mr. Peltier, who has always maintained his innocence, has an international following among those who believe he was framed by federal authorities seeking revenge.

The trial, in its second day, will determine the fate of Arlo Looking Cloud, a former low-level AIM member charged with killing Ms. Pictou Aquash, another AIM member. But the testimony here stretched far beyond this case, presenting a sweeping and frightening look at violence and suspicion inside the militant movement that drew national attention to southwest South Dakota in the 1970's.

"You would think the American Indian Movement was on trial," Vernon Bellecourt, a spokesman for the movement, said angrily from his seat in the front row of the gallery, which has been full of people who remember those volatile clashes between Indians and federal authorities: AIM sympathizers, residents from the Pine Ridge Reservation where the occupation of Wounded Knee took place, and federal agents, now mostly retired.

Mr. Bellecourt denied all accusations against the movement, and said the latest revelations were merely another effort by the federal authorities to hide their own wrongdoing. "It's virtually impossible," he said, "for an Indian to receive a fair trial in South Dakota."

Ms. Nichols, who had an 18-year relationship and four children with Dennis Banks, a leader of AIM from its earliest days in the late 1960's, told jurors how she joined the movement as a high school student living on Pine Ridge and never confided all she had seen until now because she supported the group's goals — treaty recognition, self-determination for Indians, a return to traditional ways.

"At the time I was committed to the movement and I believed in what the movement stood for," said Ms. Nichols, now 48. "I never talked to anybody about anything."

But on Wednesday, Ms. Nichols described details of the group's wanderings around the country — those fleeing the authorities, building bombs and planning their next moves. She also told how AIM leaders worried that their own members might be spying for the authorities.

She testified that the leaders, including Mr. Banks and Mr. Peltier, strongly suspected Ms. Pictou Aquash, a Micmac Indian who left Canada to join the movement, might be a federal informer. At an AIM convention in June 1975, Ms. Nichols said, leaders openly discussed that possibility.

Mr. Peltier once put a gun to Ms. Pictou Aquash's head, Ms. Nichols testified, and demanded to know if she was a spy. Another time, he talked about giving her truth serum, Ms. Nichols testified. All this made Ms. Pictou Aquash angry and fearful, she said. "I knew she was scared of Dennis and Leonard at that point."

Months later, on Feb. 24, 1976, Ms. Pictou Aquash's decomposing body was found in a ravine on Pine Ridge. She had been shot in the head, but the authorities said they could not identify her for several weeks. The day the body was found, however, Mr. Banks called Ms. Nichols and said Ms. Pictou Aquash had been turned up dead, Ms. Nichols testified.

"From the day he called me, I started believing it was the American Indian Movement that has something to do with it," she said.

Mr. Banks, who has been separated from Ms. Nichols since 1989, was traveling and could not be reached for comment on Wednesday. But Mr. Peltier's lawyer, Barry A. Bachrach, said his client considered Ms. Nichols' testimony utterly false.

"He has no idea why she's saying this," Mr. Bachrach said in a phone interview. "Anna Mae was not afraid of AIM or Leonard. Ka-Mook is doing nothing but parroting government testimony."

Mr. Looking Cloud's lawyer, Tim Rensch, suggested that Ms. Nichols might be seeking revenge on her former companion, Mr. Banks, because he had once had an affair with Ms. Pictou Aquash. He also suggested that she might be in it for money — the government has paid her $42,000, partly for moving expenses to protect her from AIM members — or even planning to write a book.

But on Wednesday, Ms. Nichols said she simply was telling the truth on behalf of a dear friend, Ms. Pictou Aquash. One reason, she said, that AIM leaders might have feared the possibility of spying so much was that Ms. Pictou Aquash had witnessed sensitive information.

She said that she had been riding in a motor home with Ms. Pictou Aquash, Mr. Peltier and others one day in 1975 when Mr. Peltier began boasting about shooting the federal agents at Pine Ridge.

Ms. Nichols testified that Mr. Peltier made a gun with his fingers and said that one agent had begged "for his life, but I shot him anyway."

Mr. Peltier, in a federal prison in Leavenworth, Kan., denies all connection to the killings and to any boasting. "Why is she doing this?" Mr. Bachrach said. "Leonard is baffled."

The defendant in this trial, Mr. Looking Cloud, seemed almost an afterthought on Wednesday. In opening statements, his lawyer, Mr. Rensch, acknowledged that Mr. Looking Cloud had been there with other AIM members when Ms. Pictou Aquash was killed, but that he had not participated or known what was coming.

Wearing glasses, with a braid running down his back, Mr. Looking Cloud, 50, looked small and hunched at the defense table. His lawyer said he quit AIM after what happened to Ms. Pictou Aquash, and wound up drinking too much, living on the streets of Denver.

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American Indian Movement www.aimovement.org/