What it does is prevent the easy reading of his accomplishments as proof that the system worked, when the system was simultaneously the thing he had to work around, within, and despite at every stage of his career.

The McLean house was a remarkable place to stand on April 9, 1865.

The document Parker wrote there was genuinely historic.

And then the war ended, and the country continued, and the structures that had shaped Parker’s life continued with it — modified in some ways, unchanged in others, requiring the next generation of Native Americans to begin again the work of navigating them.

That is not a failure of Parker’s.