The Effect Of Speck's Study On The Ramapo People

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Speck’s study had a long lasting effect on the Ramapo people. Speck’s claims that the Ramapo people had neither group consciousness nor any surviving culture or language, undermined the groups identity claims. In so doing, Speck’s assessment placed the Ramapo outside the bounds of supposed authentic Indianess. As a result, the group was left to forge their identity without benefit of his scientific endorsement in addition to the the stain of scientific rejection. Speck’s assessment of the Jackson Whites remained unchallenged until the 1980s. Only then did anthropologists begin to seriously reconsider the possibility that the Ramapo people were an Indian remnant and began to facilitate the ethnic-renewal that Speck encouraged among other eastern …show more content…

Speck began his fieldwork among the Nanticoke in 1912. He developed such a strong bond with his informants that he continued to travel back to Indian River Hundred every winter and spring for well over ten years. During this time Speck published two book-length monographs on the Nanticoke as well as numerous articles detailing their medicinal practices, hunting techniques, and aspects of their folklore. His first publication, The Nanticoke Community of Delaware, published in 1915, introduced the reading public to the Nanticoke people for the first time. The Nanticoke study is especially instructive because it established the cultural criteria that Speck would continue to privilege in his authentication of Native American …show more content…

While noting that the Nanticoke possessed “the physiognomy, color, and hair ranging from the European, the mulatto, and the Indian…” he nevertheless concluded that, “even the most negroid of these people is quite different from that of the common Southern Negro type. [The Nanticoke] are much more refined in appearance, with thinned lips and narrower noses.” Speck traced these features to probable Moorish ancestors as well as to a small amount of African admixture that likely ceased by the mid-eighteenth century. Perhaps Speck’s insistence that the Nanticoke had not experienced recent black admixture accounts for why the photos accompanying his study included Nanticoke with lighter skin tones who he described as exhibiting the Nanticoke “type.” Besides their physical resemblance to Indians, Speck noted few surviving cultural traits amongst the group, although he reported that their Indian forbearers likely inspired the Nanticoke’s hunting practices. Like the Jackson Whites, none of the Nanticoke spoke a native language. Although some informants believed that the language had been spoken in the recent past, the last speakers were believed to have died sometime during the late nineteenth century. Despite the lacking many indigenous

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