A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians — Reading Companion

Conditions of Settlement and Self-Correction

Mackenzie devotes careful attention to the legal and practical conditions governing the Indian's occupation of the Reserve. He details the terms of settlement, though the excerpt cuts off mid-sentence, leaving the full conditions incomplete. Earlier, in the preface, he corrects his own previous characterization of Indian character, noting that his expression "discovering in him such in-dwelling monsters as revenge, mercilessness, implacability" was not ingenuous. He now presents Rev. Peter Jones's position: that while these are blots on Indian nature, they are also found among whites. This self-revision suggests Mackenzie is striving for fairness, even as he works within a colonial framework.

Readers should note that the treatise's structure as a lecture means arguments unfold sequentially, with occasional asides and corrections. The opening pages thus serve as both an apology and a methodological statement, grounding the work in personal observation and acknowledged bias.

Intellectual Gifts and the Question of Capacity

In the section on intellectual gifts, Mackenzie adopts a cautious, conditional tone. He argues that it is "equally idle and unprofitable" to measure Indian mental capabilities without proper stimulating influences, and blames "repressive legislation" for a "deplorable state of inertness." He notes that in a few cases where Indians entered professions, they tended to subordinate practice to less exacting callings. However, he praises memory as "undoubtedly the Indian's strong point," citing the interpreter's ability to reproduce long speeches with minuteness.

Mackenzie then speculates that even with discipline, the Indian might lack powers of concentration and concludes there is "slight ground for thinking him capable" of imperiling white intellectual eminence. This passage reveals the tension in Mackenzie's view: he acknowledges external constraints and specific strengths, yet falls back on assumptions of inherent limitation. The reader should weigh his evidence—anecdotal and secondhand—against his conclusions.

Pastimes and Physical Prowess

Mackenzie turns to lacrosse as the Indian's national game, noting that the "agile form" nature has gifted him is essential for success. He observes that while a white team may have two or three faster runners, the Indians as a whole hold their own. The excerpt breaks off before completing the comparison, but the pattern is clear: Mackenzie uses physical traits to explain cultural practices.

This section is one of the few where Mackenzie describes an activity without immediate moral judgment. He presents lacrosse as a straightforward fact of Indian life, linking it to physique rather than character. The reader may note that the treatise's structure moves from settlement conditions to intellectual capacity to pastimes, suggesting a deliberate progression from external circumstances to internal traits to daily life. The incomplete sentence leaves the reader wondering how Mackenzie would have concluded his assessment of Indian athleticism versus white.

The Treatise as a Document of Its Time

Mackenzie's work is valuable not only for its content but for what it reveals about late 19th-century ethnographic writing. His preface admits the lecture form and his intention to preserve it without emendation, giving the text an oral, provisional quality. He cites "authors of repute and standing, native as well as white," yet the only named Indian writer is Rev. Peter Jones, and the excerpts show Mackenzie wrestling with Jones's views.

The treatise's catalog subjects—Iroquois history, treaties, social life and customs—are addressed unevenly. The excerpts focus on settlement conditions, intellectual gifts, and pastimes, but treaties are not mentioned in the available text. Readers should be aware that the work is a lecture, not a comprehensive study, and that Mackenzie's perspective is that of an outsider making "frequent visits" to the Reserve. His self-correction in the preface is a rare moment of methodological transparency for the period.

Mackenzie's treatise rewards readers who attend to its prefatory self-doubt and its conditional phrasing. The work is best approached as a primary source on settler attitudes toward the Six Nations in the late 1800s, rather than as an authoritative account of Iroquois life. The gaps in the excerpts—particularly the missing details on treaties and the abrupt end of the pastimes section—remind us that the full text may contain further nuance. Readers interested in the intersection of personal observation, colonial policy, and ethnographic writing will find much to analyze in Mackenzie's careful, if limited, account.

Sometimes a book stays because it treats old voices with care, not just facts. Mackenzie’s treatise on the Six Nations feels that way, quiet and self-questioning. I caught that same earnest hush in The Witch-cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology — Inside the Classic, where beliefs once dismissed are handled gently, like something worth remembering rather than fixing.