AVATAR: from a natives perspectiveSo to sum it up, I must say this movie is one of the few movies I have seen that made me feel as uncomfortable as I think any movie has ever quite made me feel. Like someone shoving all the death and destruction in my face in such a stark visual manner, that I almost felt sick if it wasn't for the well of anger rising in my chest. I felt angry and resentful and was fuming when I came out of the theatre. my youngest brother wouldn't understand it. he has been so much more familiar with the american lifestyle than any native lifestyle in his young life. My dad got hurt years before he was born and so he never has been able to fully understand the history, the injustice, the understanding and the anger me and my eldest brother have buried within our psyche. he, out of all of my siblings, has been the most climatized to the way of life, with fast food and video games and materialism.....of todays american society. I try to help him understand the way things were taught to me and my eldest brother, with the greatest amount of care and sympathy, but I dont think he quite gets it and my parents are much more focused on trying to survive than in history lessons this late in life. and i dont blame them at all.
My father grew up native, with a father who denied the fact he was native american. Up until his death, as far as I know, he tried his best to adapt to the normal american lifestyle of the 1950's. marriage, children, a house, a job...he had them all, but there was something buring deep within him. He was in several wars, killed men....worked construction, drank, all of it. and not until his life was near closing did he reveal the regret from suppressing his heritage, and the life long struggle of dealing with being native in a white american culture.
I dont think non-native peoples quite understand the sensitivity when it comes to being native. We are treated as an already expired culture from the first history lesson in a public school. We are there, sitting, listening to how we dont exist....like an animal. They dont describe our dress or weaponry as an art form, but instead as a decoration, like a butterfly wing or feathers on a bird. As if there was no thought into the art of basketry, no skills into the hand-sewn feathers and embroidered buckskins from long dead craftsmen. No. They speak not of us with skills, but merely of us there, like a man on safari observing his surroundings in a foreign land. And we've long since past you know...
Then you have the misrepresentations of natives in the way they perceive the world around them, how it's minute inconsistencies that todays noise pollution and destroyed perceptions have overlooked. They lump the ideals and traditions and twist them into these perverted manifestations of lies and eco-trends and earth friendly bullshit. the new green thing that everyone is in love with makes me sick to my stomach...those ignorant masses with their eco-friendly totes made by 7 year olds in china, shopping at stores filled with lead products, genetically engineered foods and illegally yet cheaply manufactured disposable clothing. it's easier to buy into the trend than to take the initiative for a lifestyle change and a day to day awareness of EVERYTHING around you and the impact you have with every action you take. spiderman comics did a better job at saying it..
In todays world, there are many types of Indians....there are the ones on the reservations...fewer and in plaid and from that older sterotype; the ones from the latest twilight films, those ones who sell sage to hippies in ojai, the sellouts who run museum tours, the rich ones who own casinos and sport it like mob bosses....They dont talk about the ones who are trying to give lectures in universities to try and break these stereotypes that are readily proliferated in textbooks the public school systems refuse to update and who belittle such and expansive culture, they dont talk about the ones who dont look like Indians who live quiet lives and work normal 9-5 jobs to pay rent wishing they only but had a piece of land instead of the cement grave beneath their feet. No, the image of faux native americans abounds and still no real presence has been able to materialize as truth gets carried away on the winds of generations of decay.
There's me, who prefers not to talk about being native, for many reasons, reasons my own, reasons that I feel no need to be put on a pedestal like an animal at the zoo, me who knows that even if i try to explain it in the fullest of details know that Im not going to be able to break through all the brainwashing and misinformation people have been raised with and taught. me who values myself and considers myself sacred. no they would not understand this.
Now what I cannot understand, well, I take that back...I do understand.....what I understand is that if a movie was made, showing the death and destruction of the thousands of tribes of native americans across pre-conquered america, with native american actors and actual truthful traditions and art and people displayed, it would NOT rake in the $$ that a CG ripoff story of imperialism in 3-D world would. I do understand that if we removed the blue make-up from the characters, and shrunk them back to human size, took away the sad-puppy eyes and took the hair-to-animal connection as something symbolic, rather than fact, we would have a film about an actual indigenous people, with real indigenous actors, that probably can trace back family that was shot or murdered or raped by an imperialist country we now call home. We would have the four nations as a story amongst some of the oldest tribes in existence, we would have real creation stories instead of James Camerons borrowed and twisted ones based in facts from REAL people.
We would have something larger than the scale of the Jewish Holocaust, but I promise you it would not cost $300-500 million to make, nor bring in anywhere near that in box office revenues....no. Also, because we are merely a dying species in the process of being buried alive, I can guarantee the uproar would be murmurs, and they know it, because we didn't have flying dragons and semi-automatic weapons when we were taken over. No. That's the one part that AVATAR got wrong.
