He did not, in the documented record of his tenure, advocate for dismantling the reservation system or for restoring the treaty-based sovereignty of Native nations to anything like its pre-contact form.

He worked within the existing framework, trying to make it function more honestly and more efficiently.

That was itself a paradox that observers at the time and historians since have noted.

The first Native American Commissioner of Indian Affairs was administering a system that had been built on the dispossession of Native Americans and that continued to operate through a form of guardianship — the same paternalistic structure that had governed Parker’s own life and that had enabled his rejection from the legal profession.

He was the most powerful Native person in the federal government, and his power was defined by his role within a system that continued to exercise coercive authority over hundreds of thousands of Native people.