Thoughts on Avatar

For my Ethnic Studies Senior Seminar:

Becoming Native: Reflections on James Cameron’s Avatar

James Cameron’s Avatar is a science-fiction thriller that focuses on a struggle between two consciousnesses of people on an exotic planet of the name Pandora in the year 2154. One population are the foreign-born “humans” that have made contact with the planet and the planet’s inhabitants, and the humans have established residency through constructed bases (through a company called the RDA corporation) that allow them to survive in this hostile environment. The other population consists of the indigenous Na’vi peoples, who consist of very tall, blue-skinned, human-esque peoples that live in the land, and through their coexistence with the plants and “animals” that also inhabit Pandora, they are seen as the nature-oriented, spiritual element to the story. The conflict between these two peoples strongly suggests overtones of colonial imperialism, as the human population is drawn by military conquest to sequester the natural resources of the planet (in particular, for the pursuit of the rare element “unobtanium”), even if that means the removal of the indigenous Na’vi peoples. The Na’vi bear resistance to this takeover in order to protect nature and their worshipped mother entity by the name of Eywa, and because of such resistance, they are faced with the brutal firepower and oppression caused by the majority of the human population.
The duality of these worlds of understanding is connected through the main character of Avatar, an ex-Marine paraplegic who is named Jake Scully. Jake is called in to Pandora to participate in the “Avatar” project, a subsidiary, more “peaceful” minded project of the human population, commenced with intentions to gain a cultural and ethnographical understanding of the Avatar peoples and their land. The project consists of humans “entering” an artificially bred Na’vi person through a designed chamber that gives them access to the world of Pandora through these bodies. His twin brother was supposed to be the participant in the project, but because of his brother’s murder, Jake has the only genes and mind to run the selected avatar. However, Jake enters the project with no cultural or regional expectations or knowledge of the Na’vi peoples, and this “clean slate” mentality allows Jake to learn the ways and understandings of the Na’vi without a bias, though he does enter with a military-trained mind and a seemingly resistant attitude to “tree-hugging” understandings of the planet. As the story goes (to some movie critics’ responses, predictably), Jake inevitably joins on to the side of defending the Na’vi peoples as one of his own through the learned experience of spending time immersed with the Na’vis for the Avatar project, as well as forces of love and a “second chance at life” (as “human” Jake is a paraplegic) influencing his understanding of the Na’vis. The theme reflects heavily with the John Smith-Pochahontas or Dances With Wolves stories that have been done before, but with Avatar, we see it in a more “alien” plight, as well as through a more futuristic lens.
Jake’s character carries the most important influence to Avatar because it deals with the ethnographic issue of “going Native,” as defined by Native author Stephen Wright, whereupon an individual with ingrained cultural knowledge of one population enters and adopts a lifestyle of another after immersing her/himself with the “other’s” people. Wright addresses in a critique of Dances of Wolves that the main character in that story, a European pioneer by the name of Dunbar, “sees in noble Indian life a means of escaping a degenerate and corrupt white world”. Furthermore, “throughout the twentieth century, going native has served as an essential means of defining and regenerating racial whiteness and a racially inflected vision of Americanness” (Wright 5). As discussed, Jake’s character is the key link between the worlds of understanding between the humans and the Na’vi peoples. The construction of Jake’s character as a paraplegic marine is important to Avatar because
Like observed in our class with the movie Qallunaat: Why White People Are Funny, the human population on Pandora take research to the Na’vi peoples in ways that subjugate the indigenous ways as exoticized and different to the human’s perceptions, and while the scientists with the Avatar program seek cultural and spiritual understanding of the Na’vi to the planet, the militaristic side seeks the Na’vi’s knowledge of the land in order to ravage and pilfer their resources. Primarily, the base is established for the militaristic pursuit of “unobtanium” on the planet, but the Avatar project, headed by a woman scientist by the name of Dr. Claire Augustine, seeks scientific knowledge on the planet and in the Na’vi peoples through experienced cultural behaviors by sharing their lifestyle, language, and other means of living. Because the humans have this Avatar experiment and the means to connect to the minds of organically-grown Na’vi peoples through constructed chambers at the human base, it suggests that these humans have some underlying connection to the peoples on the planet. However, this notion is ignored by the militaristic factions of the humans, even if the Na’vi peoples serve no threat to the human populations or the human planet. One of the barriers of research comes with the planet itself, as the air is toxic to humans and requires either entry through an avatar or through special equipment to allow human respiration in Pandora’s environment. The data collection methods for the humans involves sequestering information through the use of Jake to live along the peoples in the avatar of the artificially created Na’vi body and to record these experiences through a camera and a video log. This existence in the movie strongly suggests the notion again of “going Native” as the only way to understand and research these peoples, and even the Na’vi understanding that they have to accept Jake with the knowledge that he is a sleeping body of a human somewhere else. Therefore, it is still extremely difficult for the humans and the Na’vi to embrace each other directly, and the only portrayed, physically tangible interaction of human to Na’vi comes at the end of the movie, when Neytiri, the daughter of the tribe’s leader and the romantic link to Jake, finds Jake’s body in a human outpost. These implications of data collection are troubling because it suggests a divide between the scientists and the Na’vi peoples, and therefore the only way to understand the Na’vi peoples is to be one of their own.
I think the conclusion that came from witnessing Avatar is a need to not escape into Hollywood sensationalism and special effects, but rather to actually pit the reality of indigenous populations into the public consciousness. The story of Avatar might be fictional and highly influenced by the plight of colonialism against indigenous populations, but the story of colonialism surely is not. As discussed in the last paragraph, this notion of “becoming one to understand one” is very troubling to Native populations all around the world because it suggests the alien-ness and dehumanization of Native human cultures that exist on this same planet as all the other Western cultures. While appreciably James Cameron would use his fame and his vision to put light to the issues of war oppression and colonialism, Avatar is still witnessed as Hollywood entertainment and a spectacle of movie technology to most people. The subjugation of the Na’vi peoples as spiritual “others” has even been analyzed by some psychologists to have caused thoughts of depression to some audiences because of these members’ inescapable “humanness” and inability to be part of the world that Jake ultimately takes in for the rest of his life. This is a highly ironic claim because it addresses a want for something that we as humans already have, and that is the understanding of our own world that we live in right now. If it takes the power of the media and a captivating technologically-endeavored work such as Avatar to bring up such controversy and attention to environmental and racial issues in American Westernized cultures, then maybe we should spend more time deconstructing these tales past entertainment in order to truthfully study the histories and stories of our oppressed peoples that also inhabit this planet.
Bibliography

Cameron, James. Avatar. Released 2009. 20th Century Fox Films.

Wright, Stephen. Going Native. Delta Books. 1995.