The Pandora Story: Jake, the Omaticaya Clan, and the First Hour of “The Way of Water” vs. “Avatar”

Well, count me as one of the early skeptics of Cameron’s Pandora enterprise who, after being dragged to “Avatar: The Way of Water” by my 14-year-old son over holiday break, initially felt like I should have shut the f**k up. When I watched the first hour of ” Way of Water”, I felt like I had seen the 2009 original in a different light.

The portrayal of the fictional Na’vi in the movies has been accused of cultural appropriation for the way in which different Indigenous cultures are brought together. While “The Way of Water” does draw inspiration from the Māori, Echo-Hawk said the film could have benefited from a deeper partnership.

There were two different calls for a boycott of the film by Yu Begay, an artist from the Native American tribe of the same name, and Autumn Asher Blackdeer, a scholar from the Southern Cheyenne Nation. Countless others have also weighed in with their own complaints, with some – including Begay – calling out remarks made by Cameron in earlier interviews.

Jake was dispatched to the moon Pandora as part of an imperialist mission in the original film. There, he wears a body similar to the Na’vi, the blue humanoid species native to this new environment. As he chooses between two worlds, he must choose between the Na’vi and princess Neytiri. In the sequel, the Omaticaya clan comes up against the humans again as they try to rule over them.

The decision to center Sully – whose race isn’t explicitly mentioned but whose outsider status is a clear parallel to White settlers – plays into the tired trope of the “White savior” and was a missed opportunity, said Crystal Echo-Hawk, president and CEO of IllumiNative.

Native educators and leaders like Echo-Hawk have suggested that Cameron should have partnered with native educators and leaders to connect his epic fiction with the tragic facts that inspired it. According to him, he acknowledges that he speaks from a position of white privilege and pledges to listen to critique rather than stand up for it.

“All that’s left anymore with those films is the non-Indigenous desire to be Indigenous or to have some sort of connection to Indigenous people,” he added.

She said her group is in talks with Disney about avoiding the same pitfalls that befell the first two installments of the ‘Avatar’ franchise.

The Way of Water: A New Perspective on the Metkayina People of the Reef and the Xingu People in the Amazon. Comment on Cameron’s comments on ‘Avatar’

“The Way of Water” does go a little deeper than its predecessor. The highlight of the introduction are the Metkayina people of the reef, who were made aware of by Mori. A Mori man is cast in the role as Metkayina chief Tonowari. But many of the other characters are still voiced by White actors.

“It’s based on what James Cameron’s notion is of what he thinks Indigenous history is, what he thinks Indigenous culture is,” she said. Everyone thinks we are a monolith. What it does is flatten who Indigenous peoples are, what Indigenous cultures, language, practices are.”

Part of the outrage around the sequel has also stemmed from recently resurfaced comments that Cameron made in 2010 to The Guardian as he joined the Xingu people in the Amazon in their fight against a dam project. Witnessing Indigenous ceremonies in the Amazon, Cameron said, prompted him to consider the plight of Native peoples in North America.

He said at that time that he was 130 years old and that he was watching as the Lakota were killed and asked to leave at a point when they were being pushed. “This was a driving force for me in the writing of Avatar – I couldn’t help but think that if (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.”

Earlier this monthCameron responded to criticism of ‘Avatar’, saying that the important thing is to listen and be sensitive to issues that people have.

He said it was not up to him to tell his critics that they were wrong. It has validity. It’s pointless for me to say, ‘Well, that was never my intention.’”

Living the dream: The creators of the Toronto Indigenous filmmakers collective, Sun Raven Arts, and a real woman’s nerd

Rhonda Lucy is the founder of the Toronto Indigenous Filmmakers Collective and the media production company Sun Raven Arts.

I live it. Lucy said that her community lives this reality. The money I make would be handed over to a machine that would make me rich, but I wouldn’t want that to show me how much I’ve hurt.

She hopes that the Indigenous creatives will take this as a sign that they need to develop their own ambitious projects.

“We have a whole bunch of nerds in our community who love writing and creative writing and doing so much sci-fi,” she said. “I want to see our people leave all of this stuff in the dust, and say, ‘We made our own.’”

Sully, Quaritch, and the Na’vi: From Hollywood to the Nearby Desert: A Tribute to Sully and Neytiri

The head of the Digital Intelligence Lab is a Research Director for the Institute for the Future. He is a frequent contributor to CNN Opinion, as well as co-hosting the show ” They Call Us Bruce.” He is also an author of the book “RISE: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now.” He’s the one who gives the opinions in this commentary. You can read more opinions on CNN.

The director of the blockbuster movie franchise said in the run up to the upcoming film that the fans would not give a sht if they knew the characters were still alive. “Then they see the movie again and go, ‘Oh, okay, excuse me, let me just shut the f*k up right now.’ So I’m not worried about that.”

It was then that I realized that I didn’t like the first one so much. Ex-marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) — now decanted permanently into his cloned cat-being “avatar” — and his Na’vi spouse Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) realize that they’re putting their people at risk, because Sully’s resurrected nemesis Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), now uploaded into a Na’vi avatar, is intent on hunting him down and more than willing to murder any Na’vi who might stand in his way.

After being made the war lord of the jungle tribe, Sully and his family fled to the ocean clan of Metkayina to seek refuge. These new Na’vi look different, with semi-amphibious limbs and tails, and have different customs — customs that have been copy-pasted from a range of Pacific Islander traditions, most notably those of the Māori, including the tribe’s social structure, beliefs about hospitality and belonging and even the names of their communal home (marui, almost identical to the Māori word, marae).

They have Mori facial and body tattoos. They use a tongue out, war grimace of defiance when preparing to battle, which Mori call whetero.

But extracted from their contexts, pounded into fragments and randomly sifted together, these indigenous “homages” end up serving as mere cultural glitter, giving an authentic-feeling exotic sparkle to Cameron’s synthetic science-fiction milieu. Their original meaning is erased, and the history of the people that gave them that meaning is also erased.

There is a story about a white man who has been adopted by a non-White person, and who is superior in every way to the other people around him. In the first film, Sully demonstrates himself worthy of Na’vi respect by riding an Ikran in a record time, and in the second film he rides a vicious Tsurak at his will, earning him the reluctant approval of Na’vi.

The stories following the template have been found in many films, including “The Last Samurai,” “Dune”, “A Man Called Horse” and “Lawrence of Arabia”. The films have been both commercially successful and critically celebrated more frequently than not.

The central narrative conceit of “Avatar” is that White people are meant to be in non-White bodies, leaving their pale shells behind. This can allow a wheelchair-bound person to escape from his reality and live as a feline.

White people dropping their brains into bodies of color in order to become young and fit again is the inspiration of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” In “Avatar,” the process is treated as just another plot device, hand-waved away by presenting the avatars in question as mindless lab-grown clones, created from the combined genetic material of Na’vi and their human “drivers.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/04/opinions/avatar-the-way-of-water-appropriation-yang/index.html

Telling the Story of the Samurai: David Cameron’s Most Epic Epic Epicure, His First Movie and His First Novel “Avatar 3,” The Seed Bearer

Here’s the awkward truth: Cameron is very good at telling stories — indeed, he’s one of the best cinematic storytellers on this planet, and probably any number of other ones still to be discovered. His films go to more people on the planet than most other filmmakers, because he has such a large amount of resources.

There are two movies out and three yet to come, and the story of the Native American Trail of Tears is already better known than any other story about the genocide of indigenous peoples.

Audiences will laud the creativity and attention to detail of the film, and they should, but they will not know how much of it is an act of elaborate patchwork, a work of art.

And Cameron is just getting started. He wants to create a Na’vi tribe that is different from the human ones in each of the five installments. The next film, with the tentative name of “Avatar 3: The Seed Bearer,” is supposed to include a villainous Na’vi “fire tribe” known as the Ash People, which potentially could be a group that lives in active volcanic terrain. Will their cultural characteristics end up “inspired” by native peoples from lands in the Ring of Fire — Indonesia’s Papuans, or Guatemala’s Mayans, or the Aeta people of the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo?

With two experiences of backlash under his belt and having made a public vow to “listen” rather than rejecting native criticism, Cameron has some incentive to try something different with the third and subsequent chapters of his greatest epic.