The policy accepted, as its fundamental premise, that Native people needed to be managed by the federal government through a reservation system — that the appropriate path forward involved concentrating Native populations in defined territories, administering their affairs through federal agents, and guiding them toward an agricultural, Christian, English-speaking mode of life that would eventually allow for their incorporation into mainstream American society.

This premise was itself a form of the paternalism that Parker’s life had been spent resisting.

The assumption that Native people required federal management — that they could not govern their own affairs without federal oversight and direction — was the same assumption that had produced the trust system, the treaty process as it actually operated, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the form Parker inherited it.

Honest management of that system was better than corrupt management.