Decolonizing the Western: A Revisionist Analysis of Avatar with a Twist

James Cameron began work on his 3D blockbuster fantasy Avatar in 1995, the first year of the International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People (Duncan and Fitzpatrick 14). The film opened in 2009 during the Second International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People (2005–2015), the same year that Bolivia elected an Indigenous president, two years after the United Nations adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and a year before the 2010 Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth.1 These highlighted moments in the process of global recognition of Indigenous rights, sovereignty, decolonization movements and environmental justice represent centuries of Indigenous resistance to ongoing systems of subjugation, racism and colonialism. They signify survivance, a term Anishinaabe writer and theorist Gerald Vizenor uses to express the ongoing survival and dynamic thriving of Indigenous people despite centuries-long colonialist and imperialist oppression. Cameron’s diegetic world of Pandora and its Indigenous people, the Na’vi, reflect the influence of these real-world struggles as the narrative foregrounds Indigenous survivance and resistance to genocide and the ecocide of the Na’vi homeland. In so doing Cameron continues a tradition of Indigenous and non-Indigenous filmmakers working within the First Cinema genre system to (re)present Indigenous histories and points of view.2