In real life, there was no Spencer.
The incident at the farm really happened, which led to her arrest, but that was not when she first encountered the AIM movement.
In her later book, Ohitika Woman, Mary wrote that when she was seventeen, she was living with a hippie Native American named Pat Spears, who partied and drank hard. I'm not sure if he was in college, but she said he threw a lot of drunken college parties, and when she found out she was pregnant, she left him.
In Lakota Woman, she said she first encountered AIM when she was already pregnant. They visited a reservation she was staying at, and she was immediately hooked.
I suppose she was afraid of people making the connection between Pedro and Spears, Spears did not know about his son and she was not ready to open that door, so she omitted that from her first book, and likely asked the scriptwriter to write the Spencer scenario instead.
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