Finished Essay ((Brianna))

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If you think about it the movie Avatar somewhat reflects our history relatively well. The Na’vi tribe and the first nations peoples of Canada were both somewhat related to each other from how they were taken advantage of by other people of different ethnicities. Some people may not think about how they relate when they watch the movie just because they want to see it or just for entertainment. But a couple of the ways that the First Nations of Canada and the Na’vi People in the movie Avatar, as well as the Sky People and the Europeans relate are through cultural contact, ethnocentrism, and marginalization.

Cultural contact is the contact between two or more cultures and colonialism is when someone puts a settlement or colony on another land other than your own. In Avatar, the Na’vi tribe comes into cultural contact with the Sky People when they came to their planet to take the resources underneath the land where the Na’vi have created a home. The Sky People went onto Pandora as avatars to interact with the Na’vi and learn their ways and to try to teach them the human ways and they go in as almost a way of colonialism. Later Jake goes in as an avatar and he learns the way of the Na’vi and they accept him into the people and he changes the way he thinks about them and adopts a new respect for how they relate to the land. The way the Sky People and the Na’vi tribe come into contact is almost the same way that the First Nations and the Europeans came into contact in our past. The Europeans came into Canada and interacted along with the First Nations trying to trade and settled into the First Nations people’s land the same way that the Sky People sent some of their people onto Pandora with the Na’vi. The European’s came into Canada to harvest fish, such as salmon, seals, and bird as well as other natural resources that the Beothuk used to live on. The European’s had an advantage over the Beothuk because of the technology they had. The same thing happened with the Na’vi except they were going onto Pandora to harvest a precious metal called Unobtanium. But the cultural contacts with the Na’vi and the First Nations aren’t the only way that they are similar.

Marginalization is the placing of someone or a group of people into lesser power, or pushing someone out of their own power. The Na’vi tribe in the movie Avatar were pushed away from their home by the Sky People and gave them no power to fight back against them to stay on their land. The Sky People marginalized the Na’vi almost the same way that the Europeans marginalized the First Nations when they came into Canada. The only different was that the Europeans gave them almost no power for themselves at all. They were pushed out of their land as well as the fact that they were also forced to live in a reserve with everyone else and they couldn’t just restart in a new area like the Na’vi. “White Man’s Burden” is shown in both Avatar and in historical globalization. In Avatar the humans, or the Sky People believe that they have to teach the Na’vi how to speak fluent English and get them to leave their traditions and ways and adopt the way that they humans live. Basically the same thing happened to the First Nations people. They went to residential schools and were forced into learning the religion and ways besides their own. So both the Na’vi and the First Nations were on the other side of groups of people thinking that they are better than everyone else and that their ways are the best, right, or only way. That is just a way of explaining ethnocentrism.

Ethnocentrism is when someone or a group of people believe that their ethnicity is better than everyone else’s. The sky people thought that they were better than the Na’vi so they thought they had to send people in to teach the people the way that they lived and expected them to adopt the way they lived because they believed that the way they lived was the right way and that everyone else should live the way they do and when they didn’t adopt their ways the Sky People thought that they could just take everything away from them the same way the Europeans thought about the First Nations. Both the Sky People and the Europeans took away the land and nature away from others, and the Na’vi and the First Nations both had extremely close relations to the land. The Na’vi and the First nations were both extremely exposed to Ethnocentrism because the people that were taking everything away from them both believed that they could do anything that they wanted to other people of other ethnicities and that their way was always right.

The First Nations and the Na’vi, along with the Sky People and the Europeans were alike in ways but people may not notice that at first thought. Some people have to look harder at the ways that ethnocentrism, cultural contact, and marginalization relate to our history and also to the movie Avatar. But you have to remember that what happened to the Na’vi people also happened to the First Nations people of Canada in our history.