The structural logic that made the Commissioner’s position a paradox — that the most powerful Native person in the federal government was powerful only within a coercive system designed to manage Native people — was not altered by Parker’s excellence within that system.

Navigation suggests something more accurate: that Parker found paths through a landscape of obstacles that remained in place, using specific skills and specific relationships to move through specific openings that closed behind him as he passed.

The doors that opened for him did not remain open for others.

The opening required the specific combination of his qualifications, his friendship with Grant, his luck in being in the right place at the right moment, and his willingness to persist through years of rejection before the moment arrived.

This is not a counsel of despair.