Parker’s relationship to that work — as the community member whose access and knowledge had made it possible, versus the scholar who received the primary credit — illustrates another dimension of the asymmetries that characterized his entire career.

He was essential to the production of knowledge about his community that was then published under someone else’s name and used to advance someone else’s academic career.

That dynamic was common in the nineteenth century’s relationships between Native informants and non-Native scholars, and Parker’s situation was no exception.

The Citizenship He Never Stopped Having to Prove

The citizenship question that had blocked Parker’s admission to the New York bar in the late 1840s and had nearly blocked his army commission in 1863 found formal resolution in 1871, when Congress passed legislation granting him citizenship individually.

But the passage of that legislation did not erase the history that had produced the need for it, and it did not solve the broader question of Native American citizenship that would remain unresolved for another half century.