He was consulted as an authority on Seneca history and culture.

He provided information and perspective that influenced how other people wrote about the subjects he knew from direct experience.

He also maintained a relationship with the emerging field of American ethnology — the academic study of Native American cultures and histories that was developing in the late nineteenth century.

Lewis Henry Morgan, a Rochester attorney and amateur anthropologist who had done pioneering work on the Iroquois Confederacy, had been a significant figure in Parker’s early life; Morgan’s research into Haudenosaunee political structure and kinship systems had been conducted with substantial assistance from Parker and his family in the 1840s.

That collaboration had produced Morgan’s 1851 book on the Iroquois, one of the foundational texts of American anthropology.