 |
One of the analogies between Avatar's fantasy world and our real one is that the Navi (blue people) of Avatar's world are the Indians of ours. Actually, I thought the blue people looked more Masai then Sioux, and the landscape more South American rain forest than Kenyan rift valley, but that is the nature of a filmmaker's prerogative. Especially, if as James Cameron says, he saw it all in a dream.
Dan Gagliasso, who does a two-part review [1,2] of Avatar in the "conservative" Big Hollywood, certainly equates these blue people with the red skins of North America. But he seems to want it both ways, as is the problem with mainstream conservatives these days: He wants the Noble Savage myth of the non-conservative side, and then he wants to adhere to the more factual picture of Indians who were the ruthless enemy of whites. Part of the reason for his preference for facts is because he is a historian. I suppose a borderline conservative historian will still pay attention to those facts.
Here is a quote from Gagliasso, where he excuses the savage and atrocious methods Indians used to annihilate their enemy:
[Such things as] gang rape of female captives [and] genocide against ones enemies…wasn’t because Indians were evil, terrible people but because they were primitive stone-age warriors. That’s how primitive warrior cultures react to their enemies and if you’re not one of "the people," i.e. their specific tribe like Cameron’s Na’vi tough luck, you’re out of luck.He then writes that Indians were not only vicious to their white antagonists, but behaved in a similar manner in their endless inter-tribal warfare:
In 1841 American missionaries traveling with the Sioux were shocked as they watched Lakota warriors casually wipe out a Pawnee Village including all the women and children.He later on (in part 2) writes:
[A]t the battle of the Washita in 1868 against the Cheyenne from Sand Creek… George Armstrong Custer went out of his way to stop any killing of women and children.Gagliasso’s two part, long-winded, themeless (is it about Indian cruelty, Avatar’s resemblance to leftist Hollywood directors' visions of the Noble Indian, a critique on films mixing facts with fantasy?) review is perhaps typical of today’s conservatives, whether they be film critics or politicians.
Historically, whites have been far more respectful of Indians than our leftist film directors and their entourage will ever give them credit for (think of all the rivers, mountains, cities, towns, states and provinces that have Indian names). But no one would have eulogized the Indians then. They were savage fighters, and they would have been called terrible for the way they conducted their warfare.
Conservatives of our age, following that liberal disease of elevating "the Other" will equate the savage strategies of the Indians as simply a different way of fighting, and not as what it is: savage. Gagliasso was swayed by historian T. R. Ferenback's words which he faithfully reproduced in his article, "If you’re looking for good guys and bad guys during the Comanche Wars, you won’t find them. It was a clash of two completely disparate cultures that just didn’t understand each other."
Such desire to reconcile the clash of "two completely disparate cultures" in the recent Vancouver Olympics opening and closing ceremonies elevated four tribal chiefs to the same plane as Canada’s Prime Minister. We are all equal in our differences, but some are better.