SOURCE: "Whitman and American Indians," in Walt Whitman's Native Representations, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 55-98.

In the following essay, Folsom contends that, throughout Whitman's life and work, the poet maintained an ambivalent attitude toward Native Americans. Folsom notes that American "aborigines," as Whitman referred to Native Americans, were often described in his poetry with a mixture of disdain and admiration.

 (Have I forgotten any part? any thing in the past?
Come to me whoever and whatever, till I give you recognition.)
Whitman, "With Antecedents"(LG 241) 

Whitman was always on the lookout for cultural activities that signaled some emerging autochthonous form. If baseball was an enterprise that endorsed his hope for truly native patterns of shared experience, America's bloody encounters with the Indians undermined those hopes, for much of nineteenth-century American history had come to seem an outright attack on the aboriginal, an attempt to crase the autochthonous from...