They are among the most historically significant pieces of paper in American history, and they were written in Parker’s hand.

His penmanship, trained in mission schools and refined through years of official correspondence, was careful and clear.

There is something worth sitting with in that fact: the formal record of the end of the Civil War was written by a man who had no citizenship in the country those records were for.

The country that had fought a war over the question of who belonged to it had, in the person of the officer writing its most consequential documents, a living illustration of the incompleteness of its own answer.

What Native Service in the Civil War Looked Like Broadly