CALGARY—On a grassy hill at Blackfoot Crossing in 1967, five-year-old Milton Tootoosis watched as the bones of legendary Cree Chief Poundmaker were exhumed from Alberta’s soil. It was a solemn, spiritual affair. Tootoosis recalled seeing a teepee, dignitaries and lines of yellow school buses parked on the hill. As a young boy, he didn’t know a lot about Poundmaker — and most history books had branded him a traitor. The Cree leader known as Pitikwahanapiwiyin was jailed in 1885 for treason-felony. But there was an allure to Poundmaker that Tootoosis and the other children in attendance at his exhumation felt.“We knew as five-year-old kids that this individual that we were paying attention to that day was someone very special,” the headman and councillor of the Poundmaker Cree Nation recently said.On Thursday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is due to exonerate Poundmaker following decades of work by First Nations elders and leaders, including Tootoosis, to clear his name. The ceremony will come just over a year after Trudeau exonerated six Tsilhqot’in war chiefs hanged in 1864 for defending their traditional territories. Some hope it will prompt future exonerations, but Tootoosis is just happy to see the record set straight concerning Poundmaker’s reputation.“We are all very excited, honoured, thrilled,” Tootoosis said. “At the same time, I think it’s going to be very emotional and kind of sad because of who Poundmaker was and the fact it took this long to have some justice — to clear his name.”Growing up on the Poundmaker Cree Nation near Cut Knife, Sask., Tootoosis always wondered what really happened at the Battle of Cut Knife. The incident made the New York Times’ front page. ‘DEFEATED BY THE INDIANS: COL. OTTER ROUTED BY CHIEF POUNDMAKER’ screamed the newspaper’s headline in May 1885, painting the Cree leader as a bloodthirsty rebel. In university, Tooto ...
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