Reflections on Avatar

I had been very hesitated to watch Avatar until this class assigned to watch it. I thought the story would be very predictable and would be another representation of “savage Natives.”   After watching the movie, my expectation was mostly right, but there were some parts that made me think more deeply about indigenous peoples and the world we live in. 

Avatar was another colonialistic representation of indigenous people in ways that portrayed the indigenous Na’vi people as uncivilized, animistic creatures, creating a white male character as a hero who save the indigenous community, and making the hero fall in love with a native heroine.  Compared to traditional western films and more contemporary films about American Indians such as Pocahontas, the narrative seemed to be a bit more considerate and try to acknowledge the indigenous ways of living and their traditional knowledge.  However, methodologies to convey indigenous messages in the story seemed to have been structured in predominant ways.  For example, why are there many binary characterizations in the story such as the Sky people (colonizer) vs. the indigenous Na’vi (colonized), male (chief/warrior) vs. female (heroine/shaman)?  Why having arms and fighting were depicted ass a legitimate way to save the community?  Why are there desires of being bigger, stronger, and powerful in the narrative?

Characterization of the hero, Jake Sully, was also interesting to analyze through the logic of settler colonialism.  The character definitely describes suffering from his loss of identity and desires to be back in a community.  Starn says, "Indigeneity is a matter of becoming, not a fixed state of being, a historically contingent and sometimes very powerful form of cultural identification and political organizing" (192). Then, Is Jake Sully trying to re-discover his indigeneity?  Is it something we can re-discover?

While the story sets on differences and emphasizes these “Otherness” of the indigenous people, the narrative of settlers’ “becoming indigenous” seem to claim that there are some ideologies shared by these different creatures.

The movie was surprisingly interesting to imagine indigenous science fiction.  The narrative successfully made me ponder our conception of time in a coil-like imagination.