completed essay (dont be jealous)

                                        Avatar Position Paper

                                             By Denver T.  McComish  

         “They’re fly-bitten savages that live in a tree!” This quote from the movie shows that the humans believe that they are superior and demonstrates ethnocentrism. This movie is not just future-fiction events, many of the themes in this movie have happened in the past. The Na’vi would be comparable to the North American first nations and the sky people to the Europeans. The Europeans took the first nations land and used it for resources and riches. This essay is going to analyze the development of cultural contact, colonialism, ethnocentrism and marginalization that was presented in the movie.

         When Europeans first came to Canada they came in contact with the First nations. They learned each other’s language, traditions, and hunting strategies. In Avatar the Na’vi teach Jake to be a warrior and to hunt in a politically correct way.  They teach him how to “see” nature and the forest. He learns the “savages” ways, so one day he could bring them the message that they are going to have to leave so the sky people can take there land and harvest the resources. You probably just got a flash of deja vu because that is exactly what we did to some of the First Nations of North America after we colonized the land.

         The Sky people built a colony on Pandora. They ship supplies and people to the planet. The people settle the land and gather resources like the Europeans did in North America. The sky people mine the unobtainium and ship it home to Earth. On Earth they manufacture it into products that are valuable. This is very similar to what happened to the fur traders and the beaver pelts, except the beavers were not worth 20 million a kilogram. All that money made the ski people pretty high on themselves, ethnocentric even. 

Almost everything in this movie has to do with ethnocentrism.  The humans think that it is there job to teach the Na’vi how to speak English, but most of the humans don’t have the ambition to learn the Na’vi’s language. This is almost a carbon copy of what happened in Canada with the residential schools. The humans take the Na’vi’s land, pollute and destroy the environment. They do not care about the Na’vi in anyway, they take they’re religious grounds for self-benefit. By doing this they marginalize the natives.

As you can see it is clear that James Cameron did not look to the future to write this movie, but in fact he looked to the past. This ethnocentrism, marginalization and colonization are not a figment of his imagination, but fragments of history, our history. Its almost a movie about how we settled the west by unsettling and marginalizing the Native tribes of our country. Now it is safe to say that this movie has been analyzed, critiqued and compared.