Indigenous leaders criticize James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water

It’s no secret that James Cameron’s Avatar movies draw a lot on Native American culture. I’m not the first (or second, or 800th) person to note that the first movie — about an Earthling who embeds himself within a tribe of aliens on the moon of Pandora — basically follows the plot of Dances With Wolves, but with a sci-fi sheen. And Cameron himself has been open about his influences, as he explained to The Guardian in 2010:

"I felt like I was 130 years back in time watching what the Lakota Sioux might have been saying at a point when they were being pushed and they were being killed and they were being asked to displace and they were being given some form of compensation. This was a driving force for me in the writing of Avatar – I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future… and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation… because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society – which is what is happening now – they would have fought a lot harder."

Cameron got in some hot water for making these comments back in the day, and it’s easy to see why. Whatever his intentions, it sounds like he’s implying that Native Americans could have avoided the crushing subjugation of colonial imperialism and cultural genocide if they had only…”fought a lot harder,” which is a very stupid thing to suggest.

How the Avatar movies use “blueface” as an update to “redface”

Critiques of the Avatar films have been pretty consistent ever since. That includes the newly released Avatar: The Way of Water, which Native American activist Yuè Begay called for their followers to boycott.

For years, Hollywood engaged in “redface”; that is, non-Native actors portraying Native Americans onscreen, often in a demeaning and superficial way. In the Avatar films, most of the actors playing the Na’vi, which are the movie’s stand-ins for Native Americans, are not themselves Indigenous. Chase Iron Eyes, an activist and attorney for the Lakota People’s Law Project, spoke to CNBC about some of his issues with the series, including how it employs “blueface” as an update of “redface.”

“Blueface refers to the practice of redface. You’ve seen it in every high school, every college, or professional team that has an ‘Indian’ mascot,” Iron Eyes said. “We’ve seen drunk fans donning redface and headdresses at Kansas City Chiefs games [before it was banned.] It’s a textbook racial slur that Native people have been telling America about and it falls on deaf ears.” According to Iron Eyes, having non-Indigenous actors play aliens clearly inspired by Native Americans to “characterize their songs, dances, and language” is an act of usurpation that we’ve seen from “colonial culture” throughout history, whatever color the aliens end up being. Blueface may be one degree removed from actual redface, but the perniciousness is largely unchanged.

That said, Iron Eyes does see some value in the movie. “That connection that you see with the Na’vi and their surrounding natural, elemental universe, we still carry that relationship with ‘Eywa’ in the film, [except] we call it ‘TakuSkanSkan,’” he explained. “We have a whole set of knowledge systems that have been passed down for we don’t really know how long… We’re talking beyond millennia, eons maybe. And because indigenous nations respect that relationship, we still uphold those sacred covenants which were passed to us.”

In the end, Iron Eyes thinks the solution to these issues pretty simple. “[James Cameron] could give us a call. He could give me a call [or] any number of organizations, institutions, and indigenous storytellers,” he said. “Give an Indian a call. Involve us. This is the difference between agency and representation.”

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