The barriers were also real.

And the gap between what someone like Parker could do and what the system would allow him to do was one of the defining tensions of his life.

His experience as an interpreter and negotiator for Seneca leaders in the late 1840s was, in some respects, a continuation of his education in a more practical register.

He was learning how the legal and political systems of the United States actually operated — not as they were described in textbooks, but as they functioned in the specific context of government-to-government negotiations over Native land and treaty rights.

What he observed was not encouraging about the system’s good faith, but it was enormously informative about the system’s mechanics.