The ‘Red Road’ To Self-Discovery

She found her calling when she came to terms with her Ramapough Lenape heritage.

A younger Scott in tribal garb.

Autumn Wind Scott remembers her mother bringing out a tray of food at a family barbecue at her parents’ home in Atlantic Highlands. She remembers them chatting about the beautiful weather and how grateful they were for the day. And she remembers her mother, Joan Williams, suddenly pulling her wallet from her purse and taking out a bright new identification card. It was the early 1980s. Scott—whose name until she got married in 1979 was Doreen Autumn Wind Williams—remembers her shock at seeing that it was a Ramapough Mountain Indians identity card, with her mother’s name and the tribal seal.

Of course Scott knew that her family were Ramapough Lenapes. But while their Native American heritage had never been a secret—they had long made frequent weekend visits to Ramapough Lenape relatives “up home” in Hillburn, New York, in the Hudson Highlands of Rockland County, part of the Ramapough Lenape homeland that extended south into Ringwood and Mahwah, New Jersey—they had never openly discussed their identity outside the home.

Scott, her parents, and her siblings, Bill and Doug Jr., enjoyed a comfortable middle-class life in Atlantic Highlands. Joan and Doug Sr, devout Christians, had helped found Lincroft Bible Church in the 1960s. Her father was a cosmetic pharmacist who worked for Avon and later for Lanvin-Charles of the Ritz. Her mother worked as school secretary at Atlantic Highlands Elementary School.

“I asked her what the card was for,” says Scott. “She told me that our folks up home were going to petition for federal recognition to ensure benefits, goods, and services for those that have the need. As the day wore on, I wondered why the federal government would do anything for Indians now, when their horrific deeds through the centuries spoke volumes about their contempt for aboriginal people.”

All the way home that day with her husband, Robert D. “Scooter” Scott Jr., Scott remained silent. She recalls vividly imagining her ancestors. The next day she began the process of getting a card of her own. The tribe member responsible for handling applications, who happened to be a cousin, told her stories of her forebearers. “Both of my grandmothers were Ramapough, and all four of my great-grandparents. At that moment I felt like royalty!” she says. “In an instant I knew why I was the way I was, and why I felt so strongly about the things I did. In that single moment, I felt like I had lived a thousand years.”

Straddling her two cultures, mainstream and ethnic, Scott had already made her way in the world. Six feet tall since sixth grade, she had always been a beauty, with long, straight black hair and brown skin. Her looks and poise had helped her build a lucrative career as a fashion model—not in print, where there was a bias in favor of blond hair and blue eyes, but on the runway, where she was regarded as enviably exotic.
“My Mom has been assumed to be Jewish, Italian, or simply generic white with a tan,” says Scott, now 52. “Dad had probably always been assumed to be some admixture of black, white, and Hispanic. What race did people think I was? I identified with the blacks in the area, also a minority in the ’70s.”

When she was growing up, only rarely did school friends ask about her ethnicity, usually when they visited her home and saw her parents or brothers. When the subject arose, Scott would tell her friends that her family was Native American. “The response was always, ‘Cool, ’ or‘Hip,’ but no questions,” she says. “It probably took some time to resonate.”

After seeing her mother’s identity card, Scott looked back on certain events in a new light. She remembered a Pioneer Girls outing to a Keansburg roller rink, when she was refused entry to the rink because of her dark skin. The group leader, to his credit, put all the girls back on the bus, and home they went. She recalled answering an ad in Highlands for a babysitter when she was a teenager. When she arrived at the house, the mother took one look at her and slammed the door in her face.

Receiving her own card spurred her to plunge into Native American history, learning more about the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, a Congressional measure that decreased federal control of American Indians and increased tribal self-government.

“I recalled my youth, being at the homestead in New York on weekends with all the relatives, each woman doing a different craft, all of which I do today,” Scott says. Her husband—whose racial background is Louisiana Creole, African-American and Native American— also makes Indian crafts, and the two attend pow-wows and other Native-American events and art shows to offer their handmade work.

“I evolved emotionally and spiritually,” she says. In Native American parlance, she was “walking the red road.”

“As I began to really understand that the blatant injustices were due to racism and ignorance,” she says. “I couldn’t stand by quietly.”

Scott, who had been called Doreen by many friends and family throughout her youth, had used her Native middle names off and on. But in the mid-’80s, after a name-blessing ceremony, she adopted Autumn Wind to use exclusively among tribe members and when representing Native American issues.

In 1999, her tribal chief, Walter VanDunk, asked her to represent the tribe in Trenton on the New Jersey Commission on American Indian Affairs. Today, Scott serves as chairperson of the commission, a position she has held for a year. In 2007, Governor Jon Corzine appointed her to his Committee on Native American Community Affairs. (About 70,000 Native-Americans reside in the Garden State today.) Scott cowrote the script for the state’s Cultural Sensitivity Training DVD intended for the law enforcement community, though not yet in production.

Scott follows Native American spiritual practices, and is currently stitching and beading traditional deerskin regalia for her granddaughter, Emma, a toddler. The girl will wear the outfit when she’s around 3 years old. Scott and her three grown sons, Dale, Bobby, and Brian, enjoy an easy openness about their heritage, and she visits the classrooms of her 6- and 12-year-old grandsons, Shawn and Aidan, to teach their classmates about Ramapough Lenape customs.

“Indian people have long memories,” she says. “Something that happened 300 years ago is yesterday to an Indian. My being alive and claiming my Indian ancestry is the greatest thing I can do. I simply lucked out being born into such a rich culture. It’s a true gift, never having to worry about being hungry or homeless, because there are thousands of relatives who would take any one of us in when in need. That’s a blessing.”

Claire Pamplin is a member of the English department at Borough of Manhattan Community College. She lives in Leonardo.

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