Avatar champions Native American Spirit
Posted: December 26th, 2009 | Author: m1m2creative | Filed under: Film Art & Culture, Spiritual | Tags: Film Art & Culture, Native American, Spirtual | 3 Comments »
The comparisons between North America’s First People and the Na’vi is direct in James Cameron’s Avatar, a film that surpasses the hype and draws you in literally with its 3D technology so real you feel like you can reach out and touch it. I walked out of the theater wanting to be a Na’vi who lives on Pandora. If you’ve missed the back story you can brush up here, where Roger Ebert suggests that we can find allegory about contemporary politics in this film and that we can, but we can also discover an echo of the deep roots, the very foundations of America in the story of Avatar. Just as the humans went to conquer Pandora so the Europeans came to America to claim it as their own. Fast forward to modern times and the land left to Native Americans just happens to sit on top of some of the most coveted resources from gold on Western Shoshone land to coal on the Navajo Reservation to prime real estate on the San Francisco Peaks, to oil in Canada where the largest modern ecological disaster is unfolding in Alberta and altering the lives of Canada’s First Nations. So it is on Pandora where the humans want the resources underneath the Na’vi’s home.
CNN’s Tom Charity dubbed it “dances with wolves in outer space” as a marine becomes Na’vi, but I think he missed the point. Avatar is about us finding our way home, to our true selves. This is about human beings on earth coming back to our connection. What makes us feel alive? Do you feel alive? Are you happy with the way the world unfolds around you? Maybe it’s time to wake up. Are we awake? Can we wake up? What do things look like if we wake up? Does the most coveted thing still look like money? Do we still worship it as our motivating God or does that change?
Mr. Cameron spins dreams like a master weaver. I could see you and me reflected in this film and I could dream a new story for our future, one where our collective human culture reconnects to reverence for the land, and respect for the reason we can sustain life at all, our earth. I could dream that we would discover the fundamental beauty in the world around us and our power to shape it with the choices of the everyday. Pandora and the culture of the Na’vi calls to me, not because of its fantasy, its outerspace otherness, but because it is our own story waiting to be told.
No offenss to you but i feel more ashamed when i see this. If you want to take anything from this realize this DID happen. Not with blue people shooting massive arrows at copters but with Native amercans history, culture and ultimatley life being wiped out. Because we thought We were superior and Everything should belong too us. Infact we commited a massive genicide all for gold. So take this as telling us we have done wrong and hope we wont make such a tragic mistake again.
I still have to see the film, but from what I have read and seen from the trailer, this film resembles the story of my people, right now. The Ojibwa people in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula are resisting a proposed sulfide mining project from an international mining corporation, Rio Tinto. They want to mine nickel, copper and other precious metals underneath the Salmon Trout River which flows into Lake Superior, and are exploring and finding rich mineral resources throughout the region. The environmental risk for acid mine drainage posed by this type of mining, especially in a vastly rich watershed and undeveloped area. In addition, the proposed mine plans to blast a sacred place, Eagle Rock, to be used as its mine portal.
Our story needs to be heard. Many other indigenous peoples around the world are also resisting mining and other development projects. The legacy of colonialism and imperialism is not just an era of the past, it is happening now. Furthermore, many Native American people in the United States are unable to protect many of their remaining sacred places from further destruction, and they are one of the few people whose religious freedom is not guaranteed under the Constitution’s First Amendment and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978.
Learn more about our struggle:
http://www.savethewildup.org/mm_splash/
Thank you for your comments Anishinaabequay and Reminder. Anishinaabequay, I had no idea about the sulfide mining project in Michigan, that hits me harder as I grew up there. Thank you for posting your web link. Yes, we have to get this information out and connect people to why this is so important to care about. I hope Avatar can help in some ways to start that conversation.