TOLD

There are many great names connected to Ringwood. The Cooper Hewitt dynasty has roots here. Abraham Lincoln wrote a personal telegram requesting the production of weapons from the mines for General Grant. Robert Erksine, a surveyor under General George Washington during the Revolutionary War, operated the Ringwood Ironworks and manufactured a boom for the Hudson River. There were other leaders here as well, such as sachems [chiefs] Taphow and Manis. William Bond’s 1710 map of the Ramapo Tract documents the presence of Native people in the area. Yet, like the longhouses depicted on the map, many of the sites important to them have been erased or superimposed with more dominant structures, like the sacred rock that became the insipid centerpiece of Indian Rock Shopping Center in Montebello, New York (see the Story of Spook Rock). Narratives are superimposed as well, and we come to know the stories that are more often documented and told. Much oral history remains unrecorded, and, more significantly, Native American stories are meant to be flexible and to change with each telling.

“The stories of the Ramapough represent the changing nature of traditional tales and the difficulty faced by the folklore and ethnological community in their attempt to track credible cultural roots; this is an oral tradition that defies a particular time or place… Oral tradition is a living embodiment of story, as the native teller would say on completion of a story, ‘I am done with that, now it is yours to tell.’ The telling and re-telling keeps the story alive and a living story changes as we do.”

- Chuck Stead (2015 p.183)

UNTOLD

Native Americans are often pictured as beings from the past, historical figures with a static culture. Common representations have frozen interpretations of “authenticity.” As Thomas King puts it, “North America no longer sees Indians. What it sees are war bonnets, beaded shirts, fringed deerskin dresses, loincloths, headbands, feathered lances, tomahawks, moccasins, face paint, and bone chokers” (King, 2012 p.54). He claims that Indians are imagined as romantic figures from a distant past. “Dead Indians are dignified, noble, silent, suitably garbed. And dead. Live Indians are invisible, unruly, disappointing. And breathing. One is a romantic reminder of a heroic but fictional past. The other is simply an unpleasant, contemporary surprise” (King, 2012 p.66).

The Native American roots and heritage of the Ramapough have been difficult for some people to recognize, along with their continuing presence and role as agents of American history. They worked in the iron mines that produced crucial war goods for the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Centuries later, their ancestors worked in the Ford production plant in Mahwah. The Ramapough, Keepers of the Pass, were there the whole time: working, living, building, tending, and creating. Their names are not celebrated, their portraits do not hang in Ringwood Manor, and their heritage is questioned by those ignorant of history. Still, as Chief Vincent Mann puts it: “We are the fabric of this country. There are stories that have to be told.”

“To the metropolitan mind, the indigenous people of the Ramapos just did not belong there. Certainly there was no place for them in the park, a neatly rationalized landscape where regeneration, not degeneration, was the leitmotif. The Ramapo natives were in nature the wrong way because they were in history the wrong way. They “belonged” to the past, the same way that abandoned iron mines, charcoal pits, redoubt ruins, and old logging roads did. These landscape features, inanimate and mute, added vital texture to the region’s primeval atmosphere. The holdouts against modernity, animate and vocal, disrupted that texture and that atmosphere.” 

- Kevin Dann (1956 p.143)