The most honest administration of the reservation system was still an administration of the reservation system.

The most careful management of the Peace Policy was still the Peace Policy — a policy that, for all its reformist rhetoric, did not question the fundamental premise that Native nations would be managed by the federal government rather than exercising the sovereignty that treaties and historical precedent had recognized.

Some historians have noted a certain irony in the fact that Parker, whose community had fought for decades to maintain its reservation against federal pressure to remove the Tonawanda Seneca, spent his most powerful years inside the federal apparatus responsible for similar pressures on other communities.

The Tonawanda Seneca’s struggle — which had ended in the 1857 compromise allowing them to remain in New York on a reduced reservation — had been shaped by the same system Parker was now administering.