He was the first Native American in the position.

He brought expertise, personal experience, and reformist intentions that differed meaningfully from those of his predecessors.

His efforts to reduce corruption and improve administration were real, and to the extent they succeeded, they reduced real harm.

The second is that the system he was administering was itself a vehicle of harm.

The reservation system that Parker managed — however honestly — was a coercive structure that confined Native people to limited territories, subjected them to federal authority in the most intimate details of their economic and social lives, and operated through a paternalistic logic that denied Native people the capacity to make their own decisions about their own affairs.

Parker could not reform his way out of that structural reality.