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Chapter Three The First White Aboriginal This was Whitman. And the true rhythm of the American continent speaking out in him. He is the first white aboriginal. —D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) For the first half of 1865, Walt Whitman was working as a clerk at the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. He appears to have enjoyed the job, which offered him a steady paycheck, a flexible work schedule, and the opportunity to meet with the Native American delegates who had came to negotiate treaties and land deals with the federal government. Native Americans had been appearing regularly inWhitman’s poetryand prose since the early 1840s, but not until his time at the Indian Bureau did he have extended contact with indigenous peoples. These delegations of visiting Indians left a strong impression on the poet who had previously written that Native American history and culture are “the proper subjects for the bard or the novelist.”1 The Native delegates who captured Whitman’s attention were those he considered the most “traditional” or “authentic” in appearance , those, that is, whom he described as “so different, so far outside our standards of eminent humanity.” “Most have red paint on their cheeks,” he wrote in a composite sketch of such Indians. “Many wear head tires of gaudy-color’d braid, wound around thickly—some with circlets of eagles’ feathers. Necklaces of bears’ claws are plenty around their necks. . . . All the principal chiefs have tomahawks or hatchets, some of them very richlyornamented and costly.” A friend to whom Whitman sent this description concurred that, in essence, the only good Indian is an exotic Indian, writing, “An Indian is only half an Indian without the blue-black hair and the brilliant eyes shining out of the wonderful dusky ochre and rose complexion” (PW 2:577–80). WhileWhitman experienced the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a living panorama of exotic images, it was a place of tension and anxiety for the Native delegates themselves who had come to negotiate complex John Rollin Ridge (Yellow Bird) 114 John Rollin Ridge legal and territorial issues with the United States. No one felt this anxiety more acutely than John Rollin Ridge, who had come to the bureau in the spring of 1866 with a delegation of Cherokees hoping to find a resolution to a decades-old conflict that had left the Cherokee Nation fragmented and factionalized. Ridge was particularly anxious because the conflict he had come to resolve was a direct result of decisions made by members of the Ridge family thirty years earlier. As leaders in the Cherokee Nation during the era of Indian Removal, Ridge’s father and grandfather believed that tribal survival required capitulating to the U.S. government, and they had yielded to U.S. demands that the Cherokees leave their homeland in the state of Georgia.The Ridges and a minorityof Cherokees voluntarily moved west of the Mississippi in 1836, to be followed two years later by the rest of the Cherokee Nation in what has come to be known as the Trail of Tears. While the Ridges maintained that they had the Cherokees’ best interests at heart in signing a treaty for removal to present-day Oklahoma, a rival faction within the Cherokee Nation called the treaty a betrayal. After Ridge’s father, grandfather, and uncle were murdered by opponents to the removal treaty, Ridge himself killed a removal opponent in retaliation and fled to California in 1850. Ridge’s dream of returning to the Cherokee Nation to assume the leadership role that he considered his birthright was dashed when the agents at the Indian Bureau signed a treaty with the delegation sent by Ridge’s rivals instead.2 Whitman was no longer working at the Bureau of Indian Affairs when Ridge arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1866. Had he been given the opportunity to meet with Ridge as he had met with other Indian delegates, Whitman would probably not have considered Ridge to be one of “those great aboriginal specimens” whom he had admired for their “unique picturesqueness ” (PW 2:578–79). Ridge, who attended a private academy in Massachusetts as a youth and worked as a political journalist throughout his adult life, had adopted many Euro-American customs in both speech and dress. And even though Ridge was the author of well-received poems and essays about Native American culture—which he published under his Cherokee name, Yellow Bird—Whitman...

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