Avatar Midterm: Cross-Cultural Conservation

Jake Sully is caught between two essentially different cultures. He initially come from the humans’, whose master narrative is the inherited belief that the world is theirs, and natural resources should be utilized for profit. They believe their culture and way of life is the only way to survive, and thus rely on utilizing and colonizing alien worlds after Earth’s resources have been depleted. The movie takes place in the year 2154, where the RDA corporation is trying to convince the native people of the Earth-like moon Pandora, to move away from their native village of Hometree, so the corporation can mine the rich deposit of Unobtainium underneath it. Jake is to become an ambassador to the Na’vi, learn their ways, and find a way to make them peacefully leave their ancestrial home. 

From his first interaction with the Na’vi Jake starts to change. After first meeting Neytiri, the Na’vi princess, her mother tells Jake that other Sky People have tried to learn the Na’vi way before, but says, “It is hard to fill a cup which is already full.” They accept Jake into their manhood ritual so they can learn about the sky people warriors, but by the time his training is over, Jake is more sympathetic to the Na’vi cause. He admires how they respect their world and all living things. How they protect their “Earth Mother,” Eywa, unlike the humans that killed theirs. He knows that they are entrenched into their beliefs, their paradigms, and their home, and will never give up their home to the humans. The humans, now seeing the Na’vi has hostile enemies, Jake included, attack and destroy Hometree. In the most cliché of ways, Jake eventually gains their undying trust and becomes their leader. Eventually Jake and the Na’vi force the humans to leave Pandora.

The story of Jake and the Na’vi is one told a hundred times before: a story of Heroic ethics, a story where a white male is made aware of a marginalized peoples and attacks his own people. By doing this he ignores the billions of people affected by the underlying problem of colonialism and resource utilization, dooming his original people to Eco-disasters and most likely the exploitation of different worlds. Instead of helping to fix their beliefs, he reinforces the “Us versus Them” mentality. He dooms those people to their dualistic beliefs, “back to their dying world,” back to their doomed way of life.

This movie if formed around dualisms. Both sides of the battle are based on the other being completely evil. There is no middle ground. Gaard says we “need to  improve and expand  our knowledge and understanding  of nondominant cultures by reading about those cultures, building working relationships  and friendships across the boundaries of culture, and visiting other cultural and ethnic communities in away that best positions us to learn.” We must become World-travelers, allowing our ideas and Self to be transformed. Only then will we be able to understand the eco-community, all sides of the story, and form resolutions that benefit all those involved. In Avatar, Jake Sully has ultimately changed nothing. He’s momentarily prevented the destruction of Pandora by stopping a corporation with a small unit of military forces. He’s done nothing to try to fix the fundamental belief system the humans are locked into, instead only blindly following the new ideas he’s found with the Na’vi.