Avatar
Part 1: Newsreels
By way of introduction, let me tell you a brief story. Last year, while I was staying with friends in State College, PA, my parents visited me. At a loss of what to do after a sumptuous Thai meal with coconut curry, we decided to head to the movies to see the heralded 'Slumdog Millionare'. Cinematically I found the film quite good. The plot was predictably drole, but so be it. Early on though, there was something that was shown that was critically interesting. I speak of the scene of communal Hindu violence, where the slum lived in by Muslims is overrun with stick and bat-wielding Hindus who beat and kill their fellow citizens. Though the location of the film is Mumbai, I couldn't help but think back to 2002, in Gujarat, when 1,000 citizens, mostly Muslim, were killed and possibly 100,000, again, mostly Muslim, were driven from their homes in a systematic attack on those whom the Gujarati Hindi had felt were responsible for the deaths of 58 Hindi Pilgrims in the burning of the Sabarmati Express Railway car. The Sabarmati incident was never officially investigated. All this made the portion of 'Slumdog' poignant, in the sense of the roots of the word, poindre, to pierce with the tip of a sword or needle.
All of this is to say that there are times when styles of film stray across one-another, where documentary enters seeming-fiction. Such blurrings undoubtedly quicken the response of those who view art, by mirroring reality, however dimly perceived. My purpose here is to explain why the facts and the fiction are not as far apart as at first perceived.
Part 2: The Endless War
In the case of Avatar, the war against the indigenous people is represented from, presumably, the indigenous point of view. The film is worthy of praise on several accounts. Most demonstrably, it does attempt to render some of the inanimate connections indigenous persons feel with the land and all its inhabitants visible. It presents the desire to avoid unnecessary destruction in a way that is genuine. In the end though, the film does not extend to a level of self-review necessary for the present situation, or even for that matter, historical accuracy.
I do not offer the following as a comprehensive history, rather as the briefest of glances into a very dark past.
For 500 years in the Americas, the indigenous have been hounded, captured, experimented on, misunderstood, forcibly sterilized, poisoned and largely exterminated. The history of colonialism is a history of looting, of subjugation, of isolation, of torture and of genocide. The 'enlightened' cultures of Europe were unable in their race to explore and understand the world to spend time to listen to the indigenous view, other than to prostitute it as a means for initial survival, and then self-enrichment and profit. As far as cultural entitlement for the sake of creation of art, those beneficent gifts we should be supposedly grateful to society for, for every Shakespeare, there is a Bishop Diego de Landa, the priest who decided in 1562 to censor the Mayan texts of the people he was visiting by burning nearly all of them. For every Wordsworth who spoke of returning to nature, there was a tribe of Indians who were forcibly removed from their homes, which were in nature.
As concerns religion, doctrinally speaking, every time Jesus was introduced to a community, he kicked out indigenous gods who related to the mountains and the rains and the skies of the place. In the Americas, in the Middle East, Jesus was used, in this case, as the homeless wanderer's island of refuge. The only means of praying to Jesus, for many, was then to displace others the way that they themselves have been displaced.
In the south, Conquistadors were coercing the locals to abandon the gods of their place. In the north the Anglo response was much the same, though most recently the most abhorent were the practices of Indian Reservations & of the Boarding Schools in America & Canada. While many acknowledge that Indians were forced onto reservations, destroying their traditional lifestyle, and that those reservations were continuously shrunken to fit the needs of the largely white society, what is less acknowledged is that the war for resources and land never ceased. It has continued until the moment you are reading this sentence, and will continue afterwards. The war for land now takes place often in the courts, and in protracted land disputes over cattle grazing rights, over uranium mining, over coal mining, over oil drilling, over tree-cutting and they concern often those places least visible to society at large. It takes place as well with those who are allowed to farm, and those who are not.
In the US, cattle grazing rights, as in the case of the Dunn sisters of Western Shoshone, often come into question, and when resultant legal fees become too vast, the fees become the means of eviction for persons unable to civilly defend their right to exist on the land. The situation has been replicated in Mexico, where a million and a half farmers, many of whom are indigenous persons, have been made homeless by the government incentives for large corn agribusiness. In the Amazon, the indigenous are fighting oil exploration that is intensifying by the day as the global thirst for oil increases.
All of this is a means of introducing the film Avatar in a way that is genuine. The Na'vi are not a tribe of aliens on a far-away planet, they are the indigenous on this planet. The year is not a far-away time in the future, it is the present year, and the indigenous are not winning the battle, at this point they are merely surviving.
Part 3: Education, boarding schools, Conquistadors
When the Conquistadors brought their means of interpreting the world to the shores of the Americas, they brought Jesus. It was useful for them that Jesus was contained in a book, and that the book could be taken over an ocean. In this sense, it would have been absurd, for instance, for a few of the San of South Africa to cross the Atlantic and ask the U'wa people of the Amazons to respect the desert as their relative. The indigenous view of the Earth is perhaps summed up in the question they might have asked the arriving Spaniards, 'what awful difficulty compelled you to leave your home?'
For those who live in concert with the seasons and the earth, it is difficult to understand why anyone would desire to leave their home, let alone poison their home, as western societies seem to increasingly feel is acceptable.
Moving towards the modern times and how the educational system operates in western societies, the school for the indigenous in Avatar, promoted by Grace & her collegues, would have doubtless been filled with the finest technology available, computers that held the knowledge of the other planet at the fingertips of those who used it. But the question becomes, would this knowledge bring one closer to the reality of being alive on Pandora, or further away? Perhaps once the Na'vi learned all the names for the plants that Grace and her collegues had to offer, they began to see that Grace & her collegues were only interested in plants as specimens, not as relatives. From the point of view of the indigenous of the Americas, education has been a realm of bankrupted beliefs that destroy the land for the sake of one, possibly two, or at most three generation's worth of comfort and convenience. It sacrifices the long-term viablity of the planet, and all its people in the process. No one who considers the state of the planet honestly can say that we are creating the means to have another seven generations of humans on the planet. Certainly not equitably, and far from sustainably.
Similarly to the conquistador model, the United States, Canada & Australia had, for about 100 years and until the mid 1980s, a policy that encouraged children to move away from their families and cultures, encouraged them to abandon their cultures and languages, all for the sake of assimilation into a culture that, again, views the earth as a resource, and life-systems as banks which can be drawn upon by poisoning, and awaiting the large deposit of 'clean-up' at some point in the future. Such a bankrupt set of beliefs does not survive long without the machine aids that the present society is forced to design for itself, when it found itself homeless and cold within a land which it did not understand.
Part 4: Guatemala, Acteal, Bagua
The list of slaughter of native peoples is long, and will not be recounted fully here, or anywhere. As a poet once said, 'you can die once, twice, a hundred times, but you can't die a thousand times.' The most critical thing to remember is that the hostility towards indigenous people did not end with the cessation of the Indian wars of the 1800s in the United States, nor with the violence towards native people through the Boarding School policies in the US, Canada and Australia. This short list will not include those killed by official government policies of resource extraction, with the most criminal forms of neglect including poisoning aquifers with arsenic, barium and uranium. No, what I wish to record here are actual massacres, and recent ones, that no one seems to much notice. Those who disappear much the same way that those in Gujarat disappeared to everyone save those who lost husbands and daughters and wives and sons and shops and dreams in those days of state-sponsored terror.
In Guatemala, during the 1980s, a protracted civil war was carried out, largely with state forces attacking villagers, who were predominately Mayan Indians. The state was armed and backed by The United States, and when the math was finally worked out, the Guatemalan Truth Commission found that 200,000 people had been killed, and another 2 million driven from their homes. The vast majority of these people were the indigenous Mayan Indians, rural farmers living in the highlands and surviving modestly on what the land provided.
A little later, and further north, the Mexican Government shot dead 50 people, including 4 pregnant women, in the massacre of Acteal, in December of 1997. The government has decided that no genuine investigation is needed or will be forthcoming. The massacre is often viewed as an official government response to the Zapatista movement, a group fighting for indigenous rights to the land on which people were born, and on which they derive their livelihood and meaning for living.
Which brings us near to the present moment, and where the fiction of Avatar meets the historical reality in which we are living. Last year, a group of indigenous protesters began a blockade in response to prospective oil removal that was to commence after the Peruvian President Alan Garcia declared 93% of the Peruvian Amazon up for sale to the highest bidder. The Constitutional Decrees that the Garcia Presidency enacted were declared unconstitutional, but in the soft way that those in power have of pushing a boot onto the throat of those who are suffering, the very laws that were declared unconstitutional by the Peruvian Congress for over six months remained in the middle-realm of bureaucracy and had not been actually removed from the books. In this sense, the morality of the Peruvian Congressional Representatives, and their constituents was assuaged, but the multi-national oil companies, such as BP, started to grow impatient.
The indigenous communities, some 3000 tribes over 200,000 villages, was organized by AIDESEP, and led by Alberto Pizzango towards a set of strikes designed to shut down the ongoing oil exploration. Far from a benign walk in the woods, oil exploration often sets off dynamite beneath the surface at intervals of as little as 100 yards, critically undermining the root systems of many trees and killing many life forms who do not feel that "dynamite" is the tongue in which they would prefer to speak. Roads are built with migrant labor, many of whom are poor landless peasants. The roads undermine the forests integrity and the workers bring with them disease that many of the local tribes have never experienced before in their history, diseases to which they have no immunity. As if the initial exploration were not insulting enough, the communities who are subjugated to oil exploration are often only given the barest of notice and consultation, and rarely, if ever, given the ability to reject a proposal on the grounds that they feel it would not serve their interests. If oil exploration and extraction does occur, tribes have more roads cut across their land, roads, malaria from puddles caused by excessive soil erosion and a massive poisoning of the fresh water supplies upon which they depend.
So, AIDESEP organized a series of protests to demand remedy to the situation, and on day 55 of the non-violent civil disobedience, the State Police, armed with US made automatic rifles and sub-machine guns and helicopters and sniper rifles, opened fire in a pre-dawn assault, killing as many as 90 people. A group of Indians, protesting the misuse of their land, fight against the onslaught of the machine age. Indeed, in this case, James Cameron's Avatar could not be more timely, however not for the reason generally proposed. The film does not represent the mining rites of 'unobtainium' on a far-away fictional world, but our own planet, in our own time, and with our own contradictions. Indigenous persons are fighting the machine in the Amazon, in Indonesia where they fight lumber corporations, in Africa where they fight oil plundering, and in all the places that society at large has preferred to look away from.
Part 5: Grace & The New Piracy
As suggested earlier, it is not the realm of fiction in which Avatar operates. All premises in the film are factual and actual to our present time. They do not address scope however, and this is most endemic of Grace and her eco-collegues. In an effort to have some amount of 'good guys' on the side of the racial divide perpetrating destruction, the film paints Grace et al as fighting the good fight with the Na'vi. The truth in the world today, is that bio-prospecting of the genes of indigenous peoples is a profitable business these days, with researchers looking for ever more unique combinations of DNA in the search for cures to diseases. These diseases are, largely speaking, often the result of a society that is poisoning itself and the planet. So the 'civilized' world is again looking towards the 'uncivilized' for answers, in this case, to the very basis of life itself as interpreted by the western mind. It is as though given the ability to exist on the planet were not enough for scientists engaging in bio-piracy, they instead feel the need to reorder the universe, and then find some sense in that reordering. All of this, and the world in which the indigenous are allowed to exist grows smaller by the day, the borders of the reservation are again being redrawn.
Part 6: The End...?
In this sense, the film is not fiction, it is as near to reality as mass-market film gets these days. What is critical to understand, perhaps the most critical to understand, is that there is a fundamental un-truth about the film, or perhaps better to say short-sightedness. In the end, the machine-race is forced to leave Pandora to return to 'their broken world'. What is unstated is that every time that indigenous peoples have won a victory, here as elsewhere, every time that they have staved off 'development', it has only been a temporary reprieve. The machine-race always returns. It is always hungry. In today's society, it seems that no one can deny that the need for resources and energy is intensifying, and that resources and energy supplies are diminishing rapidly. With this in mind, the machine race will return to Pandora. They will hire another project manager, they will hire another NGO to do damage control for them, they will control media outlets more adeptly, they will misinform the public wherever possible. Keep in mind, when it is more profitable to cut down a forest than it is to keep it, the result of outcomes is utterly predictable. Perhaps then the only sense that Avatar is truly fictional is that the Na'vi are allowed to win.
