He knew, better than any previous commissioner could, what the gap between the policy as written and the policy as experienced actually looked like.

What he found in the position was that knowing the gap was not sufficient to close it.

The Weight of the System

The federal Indian policy that Parker was appointed to administer was not simply a set of administrative practices that could be reformed through better management.

It was a set of structural commitments about the relationship between the United States and Native nations — commitments to a reservation system that confined Native people to specific territories, placed their resources under federal management, and made their political and economic futures dependent on decisions made in Washington by people who were not them.

Parker believed in reform.