The debate is genuine and the evidence is contested.

What is less contested is that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was, by the time the American founders were doing their work, a functioning multi-nation political structure with centuries of history and a sophisticated body of constitutional law — a fact that the founders were aware of even if their debt to it is difficult to measure precisely.

For Parker, growing up in the 1830s and 1840s, this history was not an abstraction.

It was the living context of his community.