Yeah, I know, Avatar Week on my blog was in early January, but I have more to say, so I hope you'll indulge me, imagining, if it helps, that we live on Venus, where a week is 819 days. With Avatar scheduled for theatrical re-release this August, the film remains near the surface of American cultural consciousness, due to resurface again, as soon as everyone has absorbed the new Twilight movie.

In my first post on Avatar, I argued that a great part of the movie's popularity stems from its cultural relevance, specifically to American cultural mythos. I'd like to expand on this and focus on two opposing forces that make this a highly unsettled text, able to engage and enrage viewers on all sides of the political spectrum. Those two opposing forces are an overt challenge to colonialism/imperialism and the going native trope.

Many viewers have made the leap between the Na'vi and Native Americans. It is always shifty ground to analyze a speculative text in terms of allegory; Tolkien, for example, famously decried any claims that Lord of the Rings contains direct allegory. (The Ring of Power does not equal the atom bomb, however many parallels it may share with that piece of war machinery.) Although I am sensitive to this issue, I too made the leap between Na'vi and a Hollywood representation of Native Americans, as I believe Cameron wanted his American viewers to do. 

As noted in Annalee Newitz's article, the Na'vi wear feathers in their hair, put on war paint, worship nature gods, and use bows and arrows, all stereotypical signals of Hollywoodized Native Americans. Cameron also cast Wes Studi, who played Magua in Last of the Mohicans (another going native story), as Chief Eytukan, Neytiri's father, putting a strong Native American stamp on the Na'vi through the voice and movements of their patriarch. The scene in which Neyteri originally brings Jake Sully to Home Tree to meet her people actually resonates strongly with the scene in Last of the Mohicans when Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis's character) walks into a Huron village in order to save his lover, Cora Munroe, and the other captured members of their party. The vocalizations and movements of the Huron reacting to Hawkeye and of the Na'vi reacting to Jake are markedly similar. Although Cameron does cast many non-Natives as Na'vi, it is noteworthy that every prominent Na'vi is portrayed by either an African American or Native American actor. Perhaps Cameron wanted to keep a step away from creating direct allegory--we could call it a strong parallel bordering on allegory--between the Na'vi and Native Americans. Making the Na'vi "ethnic" rather than equal to Native American (both umbrella terms in their own rite) would allow his Na'vi to resonate with more viewers around the world and make both more money and a broader statement. But the echoes between Na'vi and common representations of Native Americans beg the American viewer to think of Native Americans when watching the plight of the Na'vi.

I believe Cameron intended this strong parallel because it allows him to recall and comment on United States history while making his conscious political statement, which is that exploitation, environmental degradation, colonialism, and imperialism are wrong. The movie articulates this statement in various ways, casting Colonel Quaritch as the villain, making the halt of overt imperialistic violence the wish-fulfillment of the plot, and showing the grief-stricken faces of the Na'vi as Quaritch and the humans destroy Home Tree. Showing invasion from the point of view of the invaded does create sympathy for the Na'vi, and by extension Native Americans, Iraqis, and any other exploited group the viewer may think of in connection to the Na'vi. For Americans, Native Americans and Iraqis will come to mind particularly, because of our recent history and an earlier cue from Quaritch, who speaks of fighting terror with terror, a fairly direct reference to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as a response to 9/11. It is interesting, too, that the image of Home Tree falling, leaving the Na'vi covered in ash, echoes the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11, drawing a parallel also between the Na'vi and the assumed viewer of Avatar, namely white, middle-class Americans. The message I got from this is that Americans are not so different from the cultures we have exploited--there, but for history, go you and I. 

To the extent that the Na'vi parallel Native Americans, this challenge to colonialism/imperialism can also be dubbed the cultural guilt thread of the narrative (more idiomatically termed white guilt, but I'll avoid that term out of deference to Caucasians not of United States origin). In my view, the cultural guilt thread of Avatar is not perfunctory, but subversive. It is a message from our collective consciousness to our culture that we need to make a change. Even though elements of cultural guilt are often found in going native texts such as Dances with Wolves, it is not the guilt itself but our collective denial of it as a nation based on a founding act of genocide that I find problematic. The action that going native stories take to erase this cultural guilt is, unfortunately, a further act of domination. That is the problem with going native stories, which Avatar certainly is. 

The Na'vi accept Jake Sully after he passes various rites of passage. He positions himself to disrupt the Omaticayas' cultural structure and usurp the leadership position by sleeping with Neyteri, the future shaman and matriarch, who would normally marry Tsu'tey, in line to be the community's next patriarch. The relationship between Jake and Tsu'tey constitutes a major fault line between this narrative's conflicting movements of anti-colonialist and colonialism-perpetuating action. Tsu'tey starts off with a believable attitude of dislike toward Jake, who has come to take his place in his social structure. When Jake mates with Neytiri, Tsu'tey is unhappy but forced to accept it. The invasion thread of the plot conveniently breaks up the rising conflict between Tsu'tey and Jake, but it does not resolve the basic discomfort Tsu'tey's presence poses in the text. When Jake proves himself to be more masculine, more powerful, more daring, ultimately more Na'vi than Tsu'tey by breaking the Toruk, Tsu'tey submits to Jake's leadership fully. It is not surprising that Tsu'tey dies in battle shortly after this troubled act of submission, because his presence at the story's end would remind the viewer that Jake has displaced him from his rightful place among the Na'vi. His presence at the movie's resolution would provide an uncomfortable note of discord amid the heroic trumpet calls pronouncing Jake's anti-imperialist message. By killing off Tsu'tey in battle, Cameron casts Jake as the fated leader of the Omaticaya, who, without Jake, would have no patriarch left.

Jake's decision to stay among the Na'vi does not make the movie's action of cultural appropriation any less problematic. In her book Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2001), Shari Huhndohrf addresses the same phenomenon in Lynn Andrews's Medicine Woman, comparing it to a captivity narrative, which she suggests provides this text's lineage:

"While Rowlandson's narrative concludes by redrawing the boundaries between European America and Native America, Medicine Woman dissolves these boundaries by showing Andrews permanently going native. Although these differences reflect the particularities of racial subjugation in the colonial period and in the New Age, the effects are similar. By making culture (in this particular case, material and spiritual culture) constitute Native identity and then by taking possession of this identity, Andrews both displaces and dispossesses Native peoples (Huhndorf 188-9)."

Jake Sully's action of learning the Na'vi's secrets and assuming their identity makes this story a going native tale, even before he becomes the leader of that people, with sexual access to its soon-to-be alpha female and the submission not only of the Omaticaya but all the Na'vi on Pandora who come together for the big fight. Avatar is therefore not only a going native tale, but a particularly forceful one, perhaps because the fierceness of its subconscious action of guilt erasure must equal the fierceness of its conscious action of guilt arousal.

Huhndorf's book shows how the American tradition of subjugating Native America (which, though no more homogeneous than European America, Huhndorf does characterize broadly in such contexts) has culminated in contemporary going native stories such as Medicine Woman and Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves. Although these stories may seem more culturally sensitive because they do not portray Native Americans as the ruthless savages one finds in, for example, Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, going native stories define Native Americans in terms of European America, and ultimately attempt to appropriate the culture of a people whose land and lives European America has already taken by force. 

About Costner's film, Huhndorf says, "Dances with Wolves [. . .] actually reinforces the racial hierarchies it claims to destabilize, and it thus serves another primary function of going native. Although the film manifests some sympathy toward Indians, its primary cultural work in fact is the regeneration of racial whiteness and European-American society" (3).   To the extent that Na'vi can be read as Native Americans, these remarks could just as easily describe Avatar.

I do not believe the going native trope completely cancels out the destabilizing action in either Dances with Wolves or Avatar. I believe in the power of intention, and I do buy that both Costner and Cameron consciously intended to challenge the status quo and point out the genocide upon which the United States was founded. However, both fell into a cultural trap that exudes its own gravity on the European-American imagination. I believe that gravity stems from the desire to a) live here and b) erase the guilt that comes with the history of how we came to live here. As a result, both directors perpetuate a long history of subjugation by enacting the going native trope, in which Native Americans serve as a painful reminder of a cultural guilt European Americans could be free of if we could only be Native American too, and through that transformation save the very culture on which our ancestors perpetrated genocide--as if this might balance the historical scales rather than tipping them even farther through the action of cultural appropriation.

Cultural guilt is the key in this equation. If we could face it rather than succumb to the desire to erase it, the actual desire behind this guilt might be allowed to surface: to acknowledge the genocide and ethnic cleansing upon which the United States was founded and redress the lies that have perpetuated the cultural subjugation of Native America. To answer Annalee Newitz's question, "When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?" we will do it when we deal with the cultural issues of which going native stories are symptomatic, in the light of day, as a nation. When we rewrite the textbooks that still say Columbus discovered America, when we issue formal apology, when we give land back, and when we listen to instead of talk at Native America, not once as a gesture of political correctness but as an aspect of a sustained commitment to changing cultural direction, this self-inflicted cultural wound will begin to heal, and the going native trope will naturally cycle out of our stories. If this does not happen, the United States will continue to anger the world by perpetually reenacting its founding trauma, and the empire will fall, just as surely as Home Tree.