Avatar Response

According to Starn, Native American (which he does not even attempt to define) or indigenous tropes used throughout the movie Avatar are exoticized through familiar settler perceptions of the “Other.” However, the basis of his argument explores how the movie informs the evolution of the field of American anthropology through a quasi-marital relationship between the indigenous and the anthropologist. Simpson, on the other hand, argues that this allegorical marriage is all together simplistic or disavows the complex understandings that the film illuminates. Simpson believes that Starn does not hold the logic of settler colonialism accountable, as he attempts to restore relations between a ruptured image of American Anthropology and the indigenous nations that they have attempted to invade through the logic of elimination. Through her analyzation, Simpson comments on a spectral existence of genocide as the “film offers a representative foil for the guilt, shame, horror, and hope that gets shuttled someplace else when the matters of settlement and genocide are contemplated.” (Simpson 206) In a sense, the film itself, does not fully come to grips with the systematic genocide of Native peoples, although it seems to still have a confounding presence within the narrative.

This analysis is extended by Simpson by a re-interpretation of the construction of the film itself as a moment, or spectacle that confronts manifestations of settler colonialism such as genocide and ecocide. She states, “Spectacles do all sorts of political work in every society but are especially useful in settler societies because they continue to redirect emotions, histories, and possibilites away from the means of societal and historical production- Indigenous dispossession, disenfranchisement, and containment.” (Simpson 207) Simpson then describes contemporary events such as a one year anniversary of a truce between Gaza and Israel one day before the release of the film and also one day before Obama declared a Apology resolution to Native Americans.” (Simpson 207) Simpson argues that the film obscures colonial violence that still occurs today by overshadowing the authenticity of the events mentioned above. These ideas made me think about the sf dimension of Native Apocalypse, where it is defined as “a state of imbalance, often perpetuated by ‘terminal creeds,’ the ideologies that Gerald Vizenor warns against in advocating survivance in the face of invisibility. Imbalance further implies a state of extremes, but within those extremes lies a middle ground and the seeds of bimaadiziwin, the state of balance, one of difference and provisionality, a condition of resistance and survival. Native apocalyptic storytelling, then, shows the ruptures, the scars, and the trauma in its effort ultimately to provide healing and a return to bimaadiziwin. This is the path to a sovereignty embedded in self-determination.” (Dillon 9) Does the film, made by a non-indigenous person, attempt to use this genre to inform the effects of settler colonialism through the Native apocalyse? If I understand right, Simpson is saying that this film illuminates the attempt of settler colonialism to sweep these issues of dispossession, disenfrachisement, and containment under the rug of invisibility.  Furthermore, she is highlighting a state of imbalance with the silencing of the Obama apology and the colonial violence that occured in Gaza, which the film’s narrative helps us to feel the historical production that ensues- Indigenous dispossession, disenfranchisement, and containment.