Native Americans were a different case, one the framers of the amendments largely set aside.

The legal structure governing Native American status was governed not by the civil rights amendments but by the treaty system and the body of federal Indian law that had developed over the preceding century.

Native people who maintained tribal relationships were considered to exist in a special category — members of quasi-sovereign nations that had treaty relationships with the United States, but not citizens of the United States in the conventional sense.

Parker’s situation illustrated this dynamic precisely.