The Effect Of Speck's Study On The Ramapo People

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

communities some forty years earlier. Despite these efforts, Speck’s early dismissal of the Ramapo’s indigenous identity had lasting consequences for the group’s formation throughout the twentieth century. In the 1993 decision to deny federal tribal recognition to the present-day Ramapough-Lenape Indians, the Bureau of Indian Affairs cited Speck’s study as evidence that the Ramapough-Lenape Indians did not meet the principal criteria of federal acknowledgement—continuous existence as a tribal entity.
After completing his fieldwork in the Ramapo Mountains, Speck was inspired to pursue an ethnography of another group of “mixed-blood” Indians, the Nanticoke of Indian River Hundred, Delaware.

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

identity.
Although Speck found the Nanticoke to exhibit the same tripartite mixture as the Jackson Whites, he reported to have found among the Nanticoke people more “surviving native characteristics,” especially in terms of their physical appearance.

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

cultural practices, Speck still believed the Nanticoke to be a “self-recognized” community with their own schools and churches in addition to “a decidedly endogamous tendency that refuses particularly to recognize marriage with negroes.” In this case, like in the case of the Jackson Whites, group cohesion played a deciding factor in decision to pronounce the Nanticoke “real” Indians.
Like the groups discussed in the previous section, the Nanticoke were among a contingent of native-descended people who established their own schools and churches in response to the outside threat of being lumped into the black underclass. When the state of Delaware passed “An Act To Tax Colored Persons For the Support of Their Own School,” in 1875, the Nanticoke sought to avoid being taxed as “Negroes” by filing for incorporation. After gaining approval in 1881, the group calling themselves the “Incorporated Body” set out to build two schools for the students of Indian River, both on lands donated by wealthier members of the community. The Warwick and Hollyville schools, built on separate sides of the county, were open to all members of the Nanticoke Community and funded by an assessment placed on each family to provide for building maintenance and the teacher’s salary. Yet, despite their incorporation and the establishment of a tripartite school system, the state of Delaware did not recognize the Nanticoke as Indians until the twentieth century when the Delaware legislature passed a 1903 measure entitled, “An Act to Better Establish the Identity of Race of People Known as the Offspring of the Nanticoke Indians.” This bill marked the first time that the state of Delaware recognized the existence of Indian descended people within its borders. Thus, when Frank Speck made his way to Indian River Hundred in the early twentieth century, the Nanticoke, like many of the other eastern remnants, had already taken formal steps to gain public recognition as Indians.