Parker’s individual case illustrates the perverse structure of Native American citizenship in nineteenth-century America.

A man who had served as a colonel on the commanding general’s staff during the Civil War, who had participated in the formal conclusion of that war, who had been appointed to a cabinet-level position in the federal government — this man required a special act of Congress to be officially recognized as a citizen of the country he had served and helped govern.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s exclusion of “Indians not taxed” from its citizenship guarantee was not an oversight.

It reflected the dominant legal and political understanding of the era: that Native people who maintained tribal relationships existed in a different legal category from other residents of the country, that their claims on the legal protections of citizenship were contingent on their willingness to abandon those relationships, and that the federal government’s authority over Native affairs did not require that Native people have the same legal standing as other citizens.