Parker’s given name in Seneca — Ha-sa-no-an-da, meaning “leading name” — was the name his community knew him by.

Ely Samuel was the English name for the world of schools, legal documents, and official relationships.

He grew up using both, in a community that had long since learned to function across that kind of boundary, because the alternative was to be understood only on the terms of the people who had dispossessed you.

He was educated first at a Baptist mission school on the reservation, and then at Yates Academy in Orleans County, New York.

He was a gifted student with a particular facility for languages — he was fluent in multiple Haudenosaunee languages, having grown up in a community where such fluency was practical necessity, and he acquired English quickly and thoroughly enough to become a skilled writer and correspondent in his adopted language.