THE PARADOXICAL POLITICS OF AVATAR

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A Hollywood Simulacrum of Indigenous Struggle
http://www.ww4report.com/node/8328, http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/living/artsandentertainment/83659192.html
by Bill Weinberg, Indian Country Today

The science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, when asked where he gets his ideas, famously always answers: "Schenectady."

Well, Harlan Ellison may get his ideas from Schenectady, but James Cameron, the director of Avatar, appears to get his ideas from Ursula K. Le Guin.

For all the ink that’s been spilled on Avatar, no critics have noted that the plot appears to be drawn directly from that of Le Guin's 1972 book The Word for World is Forest, set on the distant forest planet of Athshe. A couple of centuries in the future, the capitalist system is still going strong down here on Earth; all of our forests have long since been destroyed, so timber is being imported from this pristine woodland world. But there is a native race on Athshe of indigenous humanoids. Instead of giant blue men as in Avatar, it's little green men. But it is still a hunting-and-gathering society of tribal peoples who use bows and arrows and spears—and have psychic abilities, communicating by going into dreamlike states. After seeing their forests gutted, their tree-dwellings destroyed by helicopters mounted with flame-throwers, they use these extrasensory powers to organize a planet-wide uprising and drive off the technologically superior human invaders. Sound familiar?
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Yeah, there’s a possibility that movie-goers who have seen Avatar will be more likely to root for indigenous peoples on the six o’clock news. Except that indigenous peoples don’t make the six o’clock news.

The struggle of the Papuans against Freeport-McMoran's gold and copper interests in Indonesia doesn't make the six o'clock news. The struggle of the Ijaw people fighting against the Nigerian military and Shell Oil in the Niger Delta doesn’t make the six o’clock news. The struggle of the Penan, blockading the logging roads in the rainforests of Malaysian Borneo, doesn't make the six o'clock news—despite the fact that these peoples are fighting and dying for their land every day.

The fact that remote Ashuar bands in the Peruvian Amazon are threatened with actual extermination as their lands are sold to oil companies without their informed consent—that doesn't make the six o'clock news. And even when the rainforest peoples of Peru—the Ashuar, the Ashaninka, the Matsigenka, the Harakmut—block the access roads and seize the oil pipelines, armed only with their spears and blowguns and machetes, it still doesn't make the six o'clock news. And when they are fired upon by the security forces of a government that has just entered into a Free Trade Agreement with the United States—as precisely happened last June at Bagua—even then, it doesn't make the six o'clock news.

And when, in the wake of the massacre, a general uprising is threatened across Peru's jungle, and the government blinks and agrees to negotiations, and indigenous leaders with their face-paint and feathers meet with cabinet ministers in Lima, an utterly unprecedented victory—still nothing on the six o'clock news up here in Gringolandia, the intended destination for most of that rainforest oil.

So how are we in North America—where we consume some 60% of the world’s resources, the destination for a disproportionate share of all that oil and copper and timber—supposed to root for indigenous peoples if we don't know about them? We don't know the names of the Ijaw and Papuans and Ashaninka. But we all know about the Na'vi.

The languages of indigenous peoples are threatened all over the world, a wealth of cultural information dying along with them—and the world pays no note. But meanwhile geeks and popcorn-heads throughout the industrial nations are teaching themselves Na'vi—an artificially created language for a movie—or Klingon or Elvish.

http://www.ww4report.com/node/8328