Avatar: A Tale of Indigenous Survival? - Dolores Miralles-Alberola
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Avatar: A Tale of Indigenous Survival?
Dolores Miralles-Alberola
Abstract
This chapter explores the obvious connections between worldwide indigenous
peoples and the Na’vi, the humanoid inhabitants of the satellite Pandora in the film
Avatar (2009) directed by James Cameron. It also considers the present and future
implications of these connections on the representation of the indigenous persona
in mainstream culture, and on indigenous vindications of land, ecology,
sovereignty, survival, history and culture. Departing from a methodology that
prioritizes Native American scholars’ analysis on indigenous contemporary
narratives of the Americas and on depictions of indigenous peoples in mainstream
culture, and studying the compilation of several current articles and opinions from
a variety of forums from Native American intellectuals and activists after the
release of the film, I propose that this sci-fi film provides a symbolic liberation and
a metaphorical decolonization. Nevertheless, this chapter takes into account the
stereotypes appearing in the film, namely the good savage and the warrior princess
images, and the messianic mission of the outsider. The explicit message of Avatar
addresses current issues affecting not only indigenous survival worldwide —such
as the plundering of their natural resources and the destruction of sacred land by
corporations—but also affecting the human race in general. And I say explicit,
because there is no doubt the film seeks to send the message to as many people as
possible. In this case, the cinematographic language does not show any intention of
literary specificity; it does not have a subtle screenplay and leaves very little to
audience interpretation. Instead, it relies on an overwhelming use of 3D technology
and science-fiction semiotics. The anticipation created by the release of Avatar,
and the debate it has opened, along with the negative and positive responses from
diverse sectors of society highlight, once more, the influence of film, in general,
and science fiction, in particular, on popular culture.
Key Words: Avatar, indigenous transnational activism, liberation narratives.
*****
I say that tribal literatures are not some branch waiting to be
grafted onto the main trunk. Tribal literatures are the tree, the
oldest literatures in the Americas, the most American of
American literatures. We are the canon. 1
When concerning indigenous peoples, the history of narrative is full of
appropriations, Western literatures pretending to represent aboriginal traditions. In
this sense, Avatar is another white film about indigenous colonized peoples. It is
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beyond any doubt that this film is a Hollywood product made to reach the widest
possible audience, and it falls again into the same old appropriations and
misrepresentations by showing cliché after cliché about indigenous peoples in
mainstream culture, while making references to representations in other Hollywood
blockbusters. Among these representations are: the messianic 2 image of the white
soldier destined to be the best Indian 3(a reference, as many have pointed out, to
Dances With Wolves, 4 but also to Pocahontas, Dune, The Emerald Forest, At Play
in the Fields of the Lord and District 9); the representation of the warrior princess
that falls in love with the white man (e.g. Pocahontas and Malinche); and the
elimination of the main male characters, since the deaths of the chief and the young
warrior are required so that the white conqueror and the Indian princess may give
birth to the mixed-blood nation.
The representations of female and male roles in relation to the elimination of
the indigenous male for the sake of the creation of the mestizo nation are something
deeply rooted in places like Mexico, 5 with the foundational fiction being Malinche-
Hernán Cortés giving birth to the ‘first mestizo’, a story in which the woman is
seen as a traitor to her people, and is later abandoned by the man –a theme likewise
rooted in the myth of ‘la Llorona’ which has extended throughout Latin America.
Thus, in the film Avatar, the main indigenous male characters are eliminated for
the sake of the white man’s leadership, who, in this case, goes native and stays.
Nevertheless, I was perplexed when, near the end of the film, the Na’vi—a
clear representation of indigenous peoples worldwide—defeat the humans—a
scarcely-concealed representation of Western colonialism—and make them leave
Pandora. My perplexity was due to the fact that although the film shows concern
for environmental and, to some extent, indigenous issues, wrapped in a New Age
out-of this world atmosphere, I was not expecting such a resolution. In the end,
white people lose, and there is no possibility of dialogue and reconciliation. Only
the ones who decide to ‘go native’ may stay. The film neither concludes with a
happy ending for Western people, nor portrays any attempt at reconciliation. On
the contrary, the humans’ defeat is nonnegotiable. Considering the film’s adoption
of the previously mentioned representations, its ending is very strange.
Even in indigenous films, the ‘cowboys always win.’ A paradigmatic instance
of this tendency is Smoke Signals (1998), the first commercially successful movie
written, directed, co-produced, and acted by Native Americans. In this film, there
is a representative scene where the protagonists Victor and Thomas, two young
Coeur d’Alene, are traveling by bus to Arizona. They have a conversation in which
Victor enlightens Thomas on how to be a real Indian: ‘First, (…) you have to look
like a warrior. (…) Second you got to look as if you have secrets. (…) And third
you got to know how to use your hair’. Thomas takes his braids out of his hair at a
convenience store and when they go back to the bus their seats have been taken by
two tough-looking white men wearing sun glasses and cowboy hats. Putting his
own advice into practice, Victor looks mean and mysterious as he attempts to
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reclaim their seats. One of the cowboys, however, responds: ‘Now, you listen up.
These are our seats now. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. So why
don’t you and Super Indian there find yourself someplace else to have a powwow,
okay?’ After taking seats on a bench near the bathroom, Thomas remarks: ‘Jeez,
Victor, I guess your warrior look doesn’t work every time.’ 6 Alexie solves the
situation with disarming humor, as Thomas and Victor improvise lyrics for a drum
song caricaturizing John Wayne, the actor who represents in fiction ‘the toughest
cowboy of them all’. 7 The song goes as follows:
Oh, John Wayne’s teeth, John Wayne’s teeth, hey, hey,
hey, hey, ye! Oh, John Wayne’s teeth, John Wayne’s teeth,
hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, ye! Are they false, are they real?
Are they plastic, are they steel? Hey, hey, hey, hey, yeeeee! 8
All the passengers on the bus, including the two tough cowboys, have no choice
but to listen to the tribal song, and are thus confronted with voices they believed
extinguished long ago. Nevertheless, Native Americans have been erased from the
mainstream narratives of nineteenth-century nation building in the United States.
As pointed out by Lakota-Sioux scholar Elizabeth Cook–Lynn, the degradation to
which establishment imagery has relegated indigenous peoples’ identity and
culture, has resulted in the creation of a stereotype of vanishing people, trapped
between two cultures. Such a stereotype—promoted by intellectuals and writers
since the nineteenth century—has excluded the Native element from the nation.
The consequence of this conscious exclusion is a declaration of Western
superiority in the process of nation building. As Cook-Lynn explains:
The strong literary argument in defense of the narrative voice of
the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Euro-American culturists
seeks to declare the indigene persona non grata and
imaginatively dominate the literary landscape. The result has
been, until now, an almost unchallenged vision of America’s
superiority over those whose ancient mythologies of the land, it
has been thought, might deform and transfigure the newcomer. 9
It was precisely during the nineteenth century, the moment of the formation of
American nationalism, when indigenous voices were silenced and forced to be seen
in the collective memory as objects, losing their identities as subjects. The
supposedly extinguished indigenous culture has become instituted in intellectual
thinking to such a degree that, according to Cook-Lynn, even many indigenous
intellectuals have accepted it. This is why it is necessary to deconstruct cultural
paradigms and build new imaginaries from a Native perspective.
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The aim of indigenous fiction, as Cook-Lynn argues in part three of her book,
‘Who Will Tell the Stories?’, is for it to become a literature of liberation, which
she defines as containing the use of ‘nationalistic/tribal resistance’. 10 However, the
author explains, ‘[t]he unfortunate truth is that there are few significant works
being produced today by the currently popular American Indian fiction writers
which examine the meaningfulness of indigenous or tribal sovereignty in the
twenty–first century.’ And she points out that even important indigenous writers,
such as Scott Momaday and Gerald Vizenor, ‘seem to leave American Indian tribal
peoples in this country stateless, politically inept, and utterly without nationalistic
alternatives’. 11 It is a condition sine qua non that Native American literature needs
to provide imaginary solutions to decolonization and propose nationalistic
schemas, beyond a prescriptive nationalism associated with Eurocentric models of
nation-states. Works of fiction must contain what Cook-Lynn interprets as ‘the
political reality of the imagination’. 12 In her analysis Cook-Lynn proposes that
imagination is an essential part of nationalism, since ‘imagination is the source of
history’. 13 So, nationalism must be contained in literature, a point the author
explains thusly:
In this current movement of critical thought away from
Europeanism, native traditionalists are telling scholars it is time
to abandon the idea that without pope or emperor nationhood has
never been achieved, that, on the contrary, national affiliations
are a part of the urgency of contemporary thought and writing for
American Indians, whose own national histories have never been
appropriately defined in reality-based, historical contexts. It is
the challenge of modern thinkers and critics to find out what
these nativist ideals mean in terms of the function of literature. 14
Cook-Lynn prompts indigenous intellectuals and writers to seek self-
determination, which disappeared from the political and philosophical arena
without even being born. Accordingly, the need for sovereign affiliation is urgent
for Native intelligentsia, because national stories have never been properly
contextualized in reality. There is nothing more connected to the land than Native
tradition, which emphasizes the sacredness of land by prioritizing a connectedness
with both nature and the community. Therefore, if nation is defined in terms of
place, nothing is more nationalistic than Native tradition, where ‘[e]ven language is
rooted to a specific place’. 15
Thus, returning to the film, while Avatar is a futuristic tale, it nonetheless poses
intriguing questions about the past: what if a confederacy of indigenous peoples
had expelled the Western colonizers from the Americas? What if Christopher
Columbus had been invited to leave the territory? What if the Ghost Dance
Religion had reached its purpose of making the white man disappear from
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America? What if the confederacy led by the North-American indigenous leader
Tecumseh had been successful? All these questions revolve around historical
landmarks and make reference to attempts of resistance against colonialism.
It might be a mere coincidence, but this is a strategy used by Native-American
storytellers as a way to rewrite history and disarm the arguments that Euro-
America has put forward to justify the colonization of the continent, portraying it
as the result of a fair war between masculine armies. Kimberly M. Blaeser
summarizes this strategy as follows: ‘By a deft twist of the popular vision of
history, they [the writers] submerge their readers in the ‘what ifs’ of historical
interpretation: What if the actions of history were reversed?’ 16 In Gerald Vizenor’s
novel Harold of Orange, when one of the characters is asked about his opinion of
the Bering Strait migration theory, the character responds: ‘Which way across the
Bering Strait?’ Christopher Columbus is a Mayan who civilizes Europe in
Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus. Carter Revard has his protagonists claim
England in ‘Report to the Nation: Clamming Europe’. 17 Alexie’s short story
‘Imagining the Reservation’ begins as follows: ‘(…) Didn’t you know Jesus Christ
was a Spokane Indian? Imagine Columbus landed in 1492 and some tribe or
another drowned him in the ocean. Would Lester FallsApart be shoplifting in the 7-
11?’ 18 By means of such satiric visions of history, Native American writers suggest
that any particular order of experience can be arbitrary and subjective.
Some indigenous scholars, such as Paula Gunn-Allen and D’Arcy McNickle,
claim that most indigenous tribes were pacific, something that they relate to the
matrilineal structure of the tribes. According to Paula Gunn-Allen this is one of the
stereotypes Western society uses to justify its expansion. The creation of such an
image legitimizes the occupation of Native land, by affirming that genocide was a
fair war between virile armies, where victory perpetuated the power of the winners.
As she states, it is another strategy of official history. The image of the warrior
represented only a small percentage of Native American population during the
invasion, but this image of the ‘real Indian’ took over the image of the real people
in the collective imagination. 19
Nevertheless, we can take its message, not as a violent one, but as a metaphor
that calls for and supports a transnational indigenous confederacy of resistance to
what is happening presently with multinational gold mining companies in
Guatemala, oil exploitation in the Amazon and Nigeria, logging and mining
companies in the Penan’s lands in Borneo, and many other examples of the
plundering of indigenous natural resources and the destruction of sacred land by
corporations.
As demonstrated in a number of current articles and the opinions expressed by
indigenous intellectuals, activists and communities in a variety of forums, the
overwhelming success of the film has helped to give visibility to their claims.
Individual indigenous groups, along with activist organizations are saying they feel
depicted by the Na’vi when they tell the world ‘Hey, this is about us, we are
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them… this is not a fantasy, oil companies are stealing our sacred lands, our way
of life, our dignity’. 20
In conclusion, I believe Avatar and the debate this film is fostering work in two
ways. Firstly, by retelling history and compensating injustice with imagination, it is
helping to spread a new representation of indigenous peoples in mainstream
culture, but also providing an imaginary liberation for indigenous peoples
themselves. In spite of being a story about the past, about the possibilities of an
altered history, it has an influence upon the present and future representations of
tribal people. Secondly, the film is helping to give visibility to individual groups,
but also to global indigenous organizations, who are claiming their rights in
peaceful ways. In the online publication Survival, Stephen Corry sums up the
situation with these words: ‘One of the best ways of protecting our world’s natural
heritage is surprisingly simple; it is to secure the land rights of tribal peoples’’. 21
Finally, to the question: ‘is Avatar a tale of indigenous survival?’, the answer is,
probably not in its conception, but it has been and still is in its aftermath in
mainstream culture. However, as spectators, we must look first at the narratives
produced inside the indigenous community, since such narratives are the authentic
tree.
Notes
1
C.S. Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1998, pp. 6-7.
2
G. Boucher, ‘Interview with James Cameron: Yes, Avatar is Dances With Wolves
in Space... Sorta’, Los Angeles Times, 14 August 2009, Viewed on 10 March 2010,
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2009/08/james-cameron-the-new-trek
-rocks-but-transformers-is-gimcrackery.html.
3
T.M. Clapper, ‘The Great White Male Messiah Complex in James Cameron’s
Avatar’, Associated Content, 20 January 2010, Viewed on 20 March 2010,
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2604397/the_great_white_male_messiah
_complex.html?cat=40.
4
Boucher, op. cit.
5
G.S. Estrada, ‘The ‘Macho’ Body as Social Malinche’, Velvet Barrios: Popular
Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities (New Directions in Latino American Cultures),
Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2003, pp. 41-62.
6
S. Alexie, Writer. Smoke Signals. Dir. C. Eyre. Cast: A. Beach, E. Adams, I.
Bedard, Miramax Home Entertainment, 1998.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
9
E. Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays. University
of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1996, p. 64.
10
Ibid., p. 85.
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11
Ibid.
12
L.M. Silko, Almanac of the Dead. Penguin, New York, New York, 1991.
13
Cook-Lynn, op. cit., p. 91.
14
Ibid., pp. 86-87.
15
Ibid., p. 88.
16
K.M. Blaeser, ‘The New ‘Frontier’ of Native American Literature: Dis-Arming
History with Tribal Humor’, Genre, Vol. 25.4, 1992, p. 360.
17
Ibid., pp. 360-362.
18
S. Alexie, ‘Imagining the Reservation’, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in
Heaven, Harper Perennial, New York, 1993, p. 149.
19
P.G. Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian
Traditions, Beacon Press, Boston, 1992, pp. 209-221.
20
The following are online sources that show, in some way, the identification of
some indigenous struggles worldwide with Avatar: S. Corry, ‘Avatar is Real Say
Tribal People’, Survival, 25 January 2010, Viewed on 20 February 2010,
http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/5466; S. Corry, ‘Tribal People Appeal
to James Cameron’, Survival, 8 February 2010. http://www.survivalinter
national.org/news/5529; S. Escárcega, ‘Avatar: An Indigenous Story? Reflections
on the Conversations that Indigenous Peoples Had with James Cameron’,
Facebook, 28 April 2010, Viewed on 29 April 2010, http://www.facebook.com/#!/
note.php?note_id=410629049746; J. Hance, ‘The Real Avatar Story: Indigenous
People Fight to Save their Forest Homes from Corporate Exploitation’,
Mongabay.com, 22 December 2009, Viewed on 2 April 2010, http://news.mogan
bay.com/2009/1222 hance_avatar.htlm; J. Lee, ‘Avatar Activism: James Cameron
Joins Indigenous Struggles Worldwide’, The Indypendent, 26 April 2010, Viewed
on 1 May 2010, http://www.indypendent.org/2010/04/26/avatar-activism/; M. Lo,
‘Actress Sigourney Weaver Joins Dozens of Indigenous Leaders from Around the
World Who are Participants of the UN Permanent Forum’, Facebook, 26 April
2010, Viewed on 28 April 2010, http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_
id=396726809384&id=702175310; B. Powless, ‘Avatar and the True Defenders of
the Land’, rabble.ca: News for the True Defenders of the Land, 14 January 2010,
Viewed on 7 April 2010, http://rabble.ca/news/2010/01/avatar-and-true-defenders-
land; J. Smith, ‘Movie Review: Avatar and Real World Struggles’, Grand Institute
for Information Democracy, 27 December 2009, Viewed on 5 January 2010,
http://grid.org/2009/12/27/movie-review-avatar-and-real-world-struggles/; S. Tree,
‘Blockbuster Avatar Translates Ongoing Plight of World’s ‘Native? People’,
Vernon County Broadcaster, 4 March 2010, Viewed on 10 May 2010,
http://www.vernonbroadcaster.com/articles/2010/03/03/opinion/storyop; J. Utset,
El argumento de Avatar centra la atención del Foro de Indígenas de la ONU’,
elcomerciodigital.com. 24 April 2010, Viewed on 10 May 2010, http://www.
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elcomerciodigital.com/agencias/20100424/mas-actualidad/internacional/argument
-avatar-centra-atencion foro_201004240833.html.
21
Corry, ‘Avatar is Real…’, op. cit.
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Dolores Miralles-Alberola PhD in Spanish with a DE in Native American Studies
(UCDavis). She works for the Department of International Relations at the
University of Alicante, Spain. Her current field of research has to do with
indigenous film and representations of Native peoples in film.
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