Parker understood, from direct experience, that legal training would make him more effective in defending his community’s interests.

He began studying law, and he applied to the bar in New York State.

He was rejected.

The grounds were not his qualifications.

They were his citizenship status.

Under the legal frameworks that governed Native American status in mid-nineteenth-century America, the question of whether Native people were citizens of the United States was profoundly unsettled.

Most legal authorities of the period held that members of federally recognized tribes were not United States citizens — they existed in a kind of intermediate status, members of quasi-sovereign nations that had treaty relationships with the United States but were not incorporated into its citizenship structure.

Some states extended citizenship to Native people who had abandoned tribal affiliation and adopted the practices of “civilized” life — the paternalistic standard of the era.