More than a hundred years after the 1885 conviction of Poundmaker for treason, Cree leaders began seeking a pardon for their chief. Poundmaker was sentenced to three years in jail, but he was released in 1886 after serving less than a year because of ill health. He died the same year.

Tyrone Tootoosis, a member of the Poundmaker band and activist with the First Nations Coalition for Accountability was among those seeking the pardon. He says Poundmaker did not throw his support behind the rebellion leader Louis Riel, as charged. Tootoosis came to realize a pardon would imply Poundmaker's guilt. Instead he says, "I want the charges dropped."

Poundmaker's tribe is not alone in seeking posthumous exoneration for a leader from the Northwest Rebellion. In 1998, a bill was introduced into the House of Commons to pardon the Métis leader Louis Riel.

In 1885, Riel was convicted of treason and hanged in Regina. When reading a draft of the bill, Tootoosis discovered a clause that implied there was cooperation between the Indian and Métis nations. Historians, including Blair Stonechild, an associate professor at Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, have concluded that the two groups acted separately (while sympathizing with each other) during the rebellion.

Tootoosis would like the offending clause to be removed, saying the Indians never joined with the Métis during the conflict.

Stonechild, along with Bill Waiser, head of the history department at the University of Saskatchewan, have written a book called Loyal Till Death. This is the first comprehensive Indian account of the Riel Rebellion. The book shatters the myth of a grand Indian-Métis alliance in 1885. Combining the tribes' oral histories and exhaustive historical research, the authors examine what they call "one of the most shameful episodes of Canadian legal history."