Ramapough Mountain Indians
After relations with European colonists began, ancestors of the Ramapough Lenape Indian Nation also spoke Jersey Dutch and English.
Edwards said later that debate in the assembly related to a book written by historian David Cohen (see below); he noted that he and other endorsers of recognition had to demonstrate the historical basis of the Ramapough.
The New Jersey historian David S. Cohen, who wrote his doctoral dissertation at Princeton about the Ramapough Mountain people, has confirmed that the old stories were legends, not history.
[20] He claims that some of the group's ancestors were multiracial, free Afro-Dutch who had migrated from lower Manhattan to the frontier and become landowners in the Tappan Patent during the seventeenth century.
The historical tribe named the Ramapo was a Munsee-speaking group of the Lenape, an Algonquian language-speaking people who occupied a large territory throughout coastal areas of the mid-Atlantic states and along the Delaware River valley.
[21] In 1923 Foster H. Seville, an ethnologist, authenticated two dugout canoes found in Witteck Lake, near Butler, New Jersey, as of Ramapo origin and possibly 1,000 years old.
[24] The archeologist Herbert C. Kraft says that some of the Ramapough lived in the mountains by the mid to late seventeenth century, and theorizes they were joined by remnants of the Esopus and possibly Wappinger bands after wars with the Dutch.
Wynant Van Gelder, the first European landowner in what became Sloatsburg in Rockland County, New York, was noted as having bought land from the Ramapough in 1738.
[citation needed] When colonists entered the areas along Ramapo Creek to develop iron mines and works during the eighteenth century, they noted that Ramapough native people occupied the hills.
As the border between New York and New Jersey divided the area of the patent in 1798, Cohen theorized that some of these early free people of color relocated west into the mountains.
[28] Edward J. Lenik, a self-taught private archaeologist,[29] disagrees with Cohen's findings about African-European ancestry; he says, While the Ramapough's origins are controversial, most historians and anthropologists agree that they (Ramapough) are the descendants from local Munsee-speaking Lenape (Delaware) Indians who fled to the mountains in the late seventeenth century to escape Dutch and English settlers.
Myths, as noted in the section on their name, were derived in part from theories of origins, as well as prejudice related to unions with African descendants because slavery had developed in the colonies as a racial caste.
[32] Alanson Skinner of the American Museum of Natural History in 1915 noted the multiracial character of the people in the Ramapo Mountains.
[5][38] Kraft noted, as did Cohen (see below), that there was a gap in "the genealogical record between about 1790-1830 that prevented his assembling with exactitude individual relationships between most of the Hackensack Valley settlers and those of the Ramapo Mountains.
According to Catalano and Planche, consultants for the tribe for its recognition process, Cohen's work has been criticized by the genealogists Alcon Pierce and Roger Joslyn.
The main Ramapough Lenape villages in New York were Hillburn, Johnsontown, Furmanville, Sherwoodville, Bulsontown, Willowgrove, Sandyfields, and Ladentown.
They further organized into clans for self-government: the Wolf, the Turtle and the Deer, related to their three main settlements of Mahwah and Ringwood, New Jersey; and Hillburn, New York.
[45][46] An activist and educator, he has spoken at Ramapo College and Ohio's University of Dayton on the effects of toxic waste dumping and the Indigenous right to a healthy environment.
[49] In April 1993, Donald Trump (a casino owner) and two Bergen County United States Representatives said that "the Ramapo would bring in Indian gaming associated with organized crime".
[50] U.S. Representative Marge Roukema testified to the US Senate Subcommittee on Native American Affairs on October 5, 1993 about the Ramapough Lenape Indian efforts to gain recognition.
She said that, since tribal representatives had approached her during the 1980s seeking a private federal bill for recognition, their "sole interest" appeared to be to establish casino gambling in Bergen County.
The BIA gave the Tribe an opportunity to respond to its Proposed Finding of December 8, 1993, which said its documented petition did not satisfy all the regulatory criteria.
Without documentation, the BIA cannot make an assumption, on the basis of late 19th-century and early 20th-century ascriptions, that these unknown RMI ancestors were members of a historical North American Indian tribe.
Asked to review the Ramapough's case after the BIA declined their petition, in 1999 he said, "It's pretty clear they've got an Indian community as strong as some that have been recognized.
"[54] Alexa Koenig and Jonathan Stein wrote an article published in 2007 in which they reviewed the process of federal and state recognition, and factors affecting both.
Governor Jon Corzine's staff met with the Ramapough Lenape and other Native Americans in the state to identify problem areas and improve relations.
[57][58] The Committee's report was delivered on December 17, 2007 and cited "lingering discrimination, ignorance of state history and culture, and cynicism in the treatment of Indian people".
For instance, in preparation for the 2010 census, state and federal officials consulted with the recognized tribes on means to get accurate counts of their people.
Ford had operated an automobile assembly plant in Mahwah and its contractors dumped industrial paints and other hazardous wastes in a landfill owned by the company in an area where many Ramapough Mountain Indians live.
[65] Pilgrim Pipelines Holdings, LLC plans to run a duel pipeline through the tribe's land which would carry refined products like gasoline, diesel, kerosene, aviation fuel and home heating oil north and Bakken formation crude oil south between Albany, New York and the Bayway Refinery on the Chemical Coast in Linden, New Jersey.
