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(~1"'he First White Aboriginal" : Walt l\vVhitman andJohn Rollin Ridge EDWARD WHITLEY When D. H. Lawrence called Walt Whitman "the first white aboriginal" ofAmerican literature, it was a damnation ofWhitman 's overblown nationalism coupled with the faint praise that he had managed to attune himself to the "true rhythm of the American continent." As the poet whose "barbaric yawp" sounds throughout the "savage song" ofLeaves ofGrass, Whitman would have taken the label of "white aboriginal" as a compliment .I Indeed, Whitman so enjoyed the comparison a reviewer of the first edition of Leaves ofGrass made between his own poetic voice and the voices of indigenous Americans that he included the review in an appendix to the subsequent edition. Whitman's poems" the reviewer wrote, "resemble nothing so much as the war-cry of the Red Indians," while the poet himself "reminds us of [Shakespeare's] Caliban flinging down his logs, and setting himself to write a poem."2 Whitman would ultim.ately replace the persona ofthe white aboriginal with that of the Good Gray Poet, but for much of his career he claimed the title of American bard by virtue of his ability to bring the indigenous energy of the New World into the poetry of the United States. Scholars of kmerican literature and culture have argued that a fundamentally nationalistic impulse lies behind the desire of nineteenth-century white Americans like Whitman to identify themselves with Native Americans.3 As Susan Scheckel writes, "by claiming Indians, with their long history and mysESQ I V. 52 I 1ST-2ND QUARTERS I2006 105 John Rollin Ridge, in 1850. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, POR 1. "THE FIRST WHITE ABORIGINAL" terious origins, as part oftheir own national story, nineteenthcentury Am.ericans found a way to ground national identity" in a continent to which they had no historic claim.4 Despite the fact that Native Am.ericans were targets of extermination, indigenous themes played an integral part in projects of national self-definition, including such literary projects as Leaves ofGrass. Nevertheless, even though the posture of the white aboriginal reinforces Euro-Am.ericans' claims to have replaced Native Am.ericans as proprietors of the continent, the desire to feel connected to North Am.erica's original inhabitants has the potential to disrupt an otherwise homogeneous sense of national identity. As Monica Kaup and Debra]. Rosenthal argue, "in indigenizing the white settler who wants to belong to the land like a native, the nationalist imaginary breeds a hybrid identity."5 During the sanle dec.ade in which Whitman made his initial gesture toward such a "hybrid identity," an Anglo - Cherokee writer named]ohn Rollin Ridge similarly adopted the posture of the Am.erican poet as white aboriginal, albeit from the other side of the color line. The son of a Cherokee father and a white mother, Ridge presented himself as a cultural broker between Natives and whites by tapping into the belief, in Alexis de Tocqueville's words, that "the half-blood forms the natural link between civilization and barbarism."6 While Ridge is largely remembered today as the author of The Life andAdventures ofJoaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (r854), a sensational romance about Mexican-An1.erican resistance to white settlers in goldrush California, he was known to his contemporaries as a poet who combined European and Native Am.erican themes in poems commissioned for various public events in northern California . Ridge took the otherwise nationalistic project ofbringing the indigenous "rhythm of the Am.erican c.ontinent" into Am.erican poetry and transformed it in a way that highlighted the potential for cultural hybridity. For Whitman, of course, the white aboriginal was a persona he could remove at will; for Ridge, it was a fact of daily life. Despite this vast difference in the ways Whitman and Ridge employed the white aboriginal figure, the affinities between their projects for Am.erican poetry illustrate the possibilities-as well as the pitfalls-entailed 107 EDWARD WHITLEY in nineteenth--century attempts to imagine a hybridized national identity. III "HALF AN INDIAN" InJune ofr865, Whitman was fired from his job as a clerk at the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs over the...

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