According to the Los Angeles Times, part of the Native American community considers the film “horrible and racist”, and calls for its boycott. The daily cites the words of Yuè Begay, the co-president of the Indigenous Pride association. The latter strongly criticized the film on Twitter. “Our crops have been taken away from us in harmful ways to satisfy the one man savior complex”, she wrote.
Do NOT watch Avatar: The Way of Water
Join Natives & other Indigenous groups around the world in boycotting this horrible & racist film. Our cultures were appropriated in a harmful manner to satisfy some ???? man’s savior complex.
No more Blueface!
Lakota people are powerful! pic.twitter.com/NmHVU565u3— ????Asdzáá Tłʼéé honaaʼéí????(She/Her)???? (@asdza_tlehonaei) December 18, 2022
Other critics denounce the crude depiction of a traditional Maori tattoo from New Zealand, the Tā moko. As seen in the Avatar 2 trailer some characters are covered in tattoos. For Mana Tyne, a young Australian Maori, interviewed by the Washington Post, the “abstract” forms of the tattoo and “devoid of meaning” rather serve the game of aesthetics.
For many people, the problem also lies in the fact that the characters from the indigenous tribes are played by actors who are not from the Native American community, while the story is inspired by their history and culture. “It is a form of racist caricature, which is called ‘Blueface’, a phenomenon which aims to appropriate many elements of non-white cultures, mix them indiscriminately, in a blatant way, while letting white actors to finally use the argument of fiction as a medium to validate this construction of the world”, explained Yuè Begay on Twitter.
A criticism already formulated during the first opus of Avatar. In an interview at Guardian in 2010director James Cameron said: “I felt like I was 130 years back and watching what the Sioux might have said at a time when they were being slaughtered and being demanded to go. ”. And to add:It was a driving force in writingAvatar. I couldn’t help but think that if the Lakota Sioux had had a window of time, allowing them to see the future, to see that their children’s suicide rate is the highest in our nation, to see what is happening now, they would have fought much harder.”
After the critics, the filmmaker assured in 2012 that his film was a “science fiction story inspired by the history of North and South America during the early colonial period”, and that he had made improvements in this respect in the second. This time, he did not respond to requests from journalists about this criticism.