It quite literally seems that whenever a movie hits cinemas these days, there’s a certain group of people looking to have that motion picture boycotted. And it appears “Avatar: The Way Of Water” is the latest film to receive that treatment, with a significant amount of social media users — particularly on Twitter — calling for the sequel to be snubbed amid racism claims.
Some movie-goers who caught the second installment in the science fiction franchise since its release last week believe that the film’s director James Cameron combined a mixture of various Indigenous cultures for a movie that’s predominantly played by white cast members.
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
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Indigenous people are usually culturally distinct ethnic groups that share ancestral ties to the lands where they reside — in this case, North America. So the argument made on social media is that James has apparently appropriated another culture, combined “racist tools” such as putting them in “Blueface,” a term which became popular after 2009’s “Avatar,” and failed to validate the actual experience of the Indigenous people for the sake of entertainment purposes.
“Do NOT watch Avatar: The Way of Water,” a tweet by Yué Begay, a native American social media personality wrote in her tweet, which has so far attracted over 40,000 likes.
“Join Natives & other Indigenous groups around the world in boycotting this horrible & racist film.”
She also believes that James has purposely targeted Indigenous people by taking many parts of their history and lifestyle to replicate their hardships and struggles for his movie, in which he then hires a mostly white cast to embody those said roles.
And if that wasn’t enough, people began to pull up an old interview from James, where he described once visiting the Brazilian Zingu people in the Amazon, where he drew the inspiration for “Avatar.”
“This was a driving force for me in the writing of Avatar—I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future,” he shared. “And they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation…because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society—which is what is happening now—they would have fought a lot harder.”
Natives been telling ya’ll James Cameron’s Avatar is racist and creepy as hell. The way he talks about the Lakota in this article is absolutely horrible.https://t.co/qnDWEtrP81
— Johnnie Jae aka The Burnt Ball of Fury (@johnniejae) December 16, 2022
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James himself has never denied that he definitely had some inspiration from learning more about the Ingenious culture. “Avatar is a science fiction retelling of the history of North and South America in the early colonial period,” James said in 2012.
“Avatar very pointedly made reference to the colonial period in the Americas, with all its conflict and bloodshed between the military aggressors from Europe and the indigenous peoples. Europe equals Earth. The native Americans are the Na’vi. It’s not meant to be subtle.”