The premiere of ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’ has resulted in multimillion-dollar collections -although still far from what James Cameron He said that it was necessary for the film to be profitable – and it is even said that he will be among the next Oscar nominees. However, not all is good news, as a boycott has been organized against it for some statements that Cameron made back in 2010.
One of the points of inspiration for the saga was America’s own colonial history, something already evident in the first installment and which is addressed again in ‘Avatar 2’. Cameron has never had a problem admitting it and in 2010 he went so far as to state the following in an interview with The Guardian:
I felt like I had traveled 130 years back in time to see what the Lakota might have said at the time they were driven out and killed, when they were resettled and received some kind of compensation in return. That was the force that prompted me to write Avatar. I couldn’t help but think that if they had been able to see into the future and had seen their children with the highest suicide rates in the nation…because they had no more hope and they were a dead end society, they would have fought much harder.
“Don’t go see her”
Those statements are valid a boycott campaign started On twitter with a message that has gained traction stating that “Don’t go see ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’. Join Native Americans and other indigenous groups around the world in boycotting this horrible and racist film. Our cultures have been misappropriated to satisfy a ‘white savior complex’. No more blue faces. The Lakota people are powerful!“.
For his part, Crystal Echo-Hawk, President and CEO of IllumiNative has stressed that “Cameron may be telling the story of colonization, but he’s doing it through the lens of the white man.“. According to her, a way to improve that would have been to hire more indigenous people to work on the film, thus settling the issue:
It’s a level of arrogance, once again, for a white filmmaker to think that somehow telling a story based on indigenous peoples better than indigenous peoples ever could.
Curiously, Cameron himself spoke about it a few days ago, shortly before the controversy broke out, pointing out that it was never his intention to do something like that:
The important thing is to listen and be sensitive to the problems that people have. It is not for me, speaking from a white privilege perspective, if you will, to tell them that they are wrong. It has validity. It doesn’t make sense for me to say, “Well, that was never my intention.”
Yes indeed, Cameron is already late if he wants to make any changes for ‘Avatar 3’, since it has already been filmed and is in the middle of the post-production process. We’ll see if he takes note for the inevitable fourth installment…
In Espinof: