If you want to see examples of Indigenous futuristic filmmaking, may I suggest you look somewhere other than James Cameron?

There is the recent film by Cree-Métis filmmaker Danis Goulet night raiders or the extremely timely latest film from the late Mi’kmaw filmmaker Jeff Barnaby, amount of blood, released on stream around the start of the COVID pandemic.

These two films examine and reframe Aboriginal history through an Aboriginal perspective: the trauma of residential school in the case of night raiders and the unique relationship that indigenous people have with a foreign disease (think smallpox) in the case of quantum of blood. Both films are about issues that affect and have affected Indian Country.

If you want to see a white man’s version of a Native Futurism movie, then the local multiplex showing Avatar: The Way of the Water is the way to go.

That said, the plot of what some call Avatar 2 is quite simple: the earth is dying, humans need resources, and this requires a complete takeover of the planet Pandora, which also requires the “taming” of the native inhabitants, the Na’vi.

A former Avatar and now a full-fledged Na’vi, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his family are driven from their home country by Sully’s former military colleague Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who has also become Na’vi. ‘vi in ​​his own right and is determined to get revenge. Sully intends to protect his family against new dangers. Why is he running? Is it white guilt? He claims it’s to protect his native clan, but his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) wants to fight.

The Sully family flies far out to sea where they meet Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), the chief of the Maori-inspired Metkayina clan. The Metkayina are slow to accept them into their territories (the Sullys cannot swim well and their tails are too small) but eventually take the Sullys as one of their own and in time will join in the fight against the intruders approaching terrestrials. , the People of Heaven.

Cameron’s latest is a curious mix of surface indigenity signified from a white man’s perspective: long braids and dreadlocks attached to foreign bodies, the bodies laden with “exotic” elements your mokostyle tattoos. Ten-foot-tall men and women with big elf-like eyes and ears are set in exotic alien locations reminiscent of the fantasy artist Frank Frazetta or some Lakota friends that I met. Added to this is the link that these beings, the Na’vi, have with the land and its inhabitants. This is fantastic Indigeneity.

It’s hard not to be skeptical of Cameron’s understanding of the indigenous material he appropriates here. Of course, you can invent anything you want in a fantasy tale and even have your cake left too. There are no rules for filmmaking or art in general, and if you have the funding, the world is yours. We can create a world where we see the myopia of white men vis-à-vis the environment; a story of materialism and colonialism where the consequences of a hunger and thirst for money and resources are displayed from beginning to end. Where is the fault in that?

The fault is that James Cameron can travel the world, do the “research”, hire native film legends like Wes Studi (Cherokee) in the first Avatar movie and Cliff Curtis (Maori) and Jermaine Clement (Maori) in Avatar 2but he cannot escape who he is: a filmmaker who told the Guardian in 2010 that his inspiration in making the first Avatar movie was based on the Lakota Sioux.

“I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had a window of time and they could see the future…and they could see their children committing suicide at the highest suicide rate in the nation …because they were hopeless and they were a dead end society – which is happening now – they would have fought a lot harder.

Cameron’s comments are tone-deaf, condescending, and not the kind of ally I want or need to help tell Indigenous stories. It’s one thing to read and research a culture; it is quite another to be one. Perhaps for this reason there is a boycott of the film currently underway by many indigenous groups, one of which is led by Asdzáá Tłʼéé honaaʼéí, a Navajo artist and co-chair of Native Pride Los Angeles.

The animation in Avatar: The Way of the Water is visually stunning. The animals in particular – I’ll call them Sea Beasts and Air Beasts – are very realistic, with shadows and texture, and many have souls and thoughts of their own and communicate them to the Na’vi. The concept (much like the movie) draws a fine line between being corny and magical, and you just have to follow the concept, if you buy into it. It is believed that if you have paid the ticket to be in the theater, you are ready to go for the ride. I saw the film like a merry-go-round, once in an IMAX 3D theater and once in a regular theater. As someone who wears glasses, I have to say that I think I enjoyed the movie better without the 3D equipment (there’s also less chance of getting popcorn butter on your clumsy 3D glasses).

The thesis of the film, amid various subplots, exotic character names and Pandora versions of whales and sharks and fascinating technology, seems to be: family first. In this case, it’s the Sully family battling the elements and their enemies to persevere on the frontier.

Sully (a Marine in his former human life) and his sons communicate with each other in military language and it’s a bit grating; his sons respond “yes sir” to their father not out of respect but because that’s simply how they relate to each other; they are sons in their father’s army. It’s a Sully family quirk. Is it wrong? Not necessarily, but it’s certainly shocking to hear in a family supposedly influenced by native culture.

And while it’s not entirely off topic, the poor white kid the Sully family adopted, Spider (sort of a mix of wild child in Mad Max and Justin Bieber, in the days of gas stations), is often forgotten or left at the bottom of the list of family priorities. The mother practically despises him and he knows it. The disrespect the Sully clan has for their human adoptee becomes comical as the film progresses.

At 3 hours and 10 minutes, the film needs a more aggressive editor. While the time spent in the Metkayina territories provides a great story, we probably don’t need to spend so much time exploring this new Na’vi version of Maoriland. I was intrigued by the updated Western film influences: trains are derailed by Comanche, uh, I mean Na’vi, and looted for modern weapons, Sky people see Na’vi as obstacles to “progress”, the Sully family is seen as dirty “half-breeds”, half people from the sky, half Na’vi.

A movie like this takes a lot of money to make, and as such is a technological marvel. Still, I wonder if a producer had just given a Maori-inspired project like this to a real Indigenous filmmaker, maybe a real Maori filmmaker like Taika Waititi, and if we had a real Indigenous filmmaker telling the story instead of a story told through a white man’s lens updating the tropes of colonial Western films? What would that look like? And why are we again looking at an Indigenous story through the lens of a white man (3D)? Well, the obvious answer is that James Cameron has the money to do it. But when can indigenous people do something like this?

Or maybe the better question is: is this the kind of thing that indigenous people would even want to do?

There are many real issues affecting Indigenous peoples in 2022. The Next Supreme Court ICWA decision As to whether native adoptees can stay with native families or not, that comes to mind. We have water issues (which this film ironically has nothing to do with), of course colonialism is rampant and the struggle for resources is still at stake, but do we need a white man to dress those problems in the fantasy world where 10-foot-tall aliens are fighting “hard enough” to save the day and prove that we’re not a “dead end society” after all? Perhaps Indigenous Futurism should be left in the hands of genuine Indigenous filmmakers who know and can tell these stories?

When the first Avatar came out in 2009, I liked it. The technology was shiny and new, there were fewer native stories on the film, maybe I even asked less of the type of native I saw on screen; the times have changed. In 2022, we had three Indigenous-led television shows in the United States: Rutherford Falls, Reservation dogsand dark winds. Reservation dogs alone had at least half a dozen Aboriginal directors in its ranks. The time has come for Indigenous directors to remake those Westerns and continue to make our own Indigenous futuristic movies in our image, flipping the script, teasing tropes, putting Indian before Cowboy. We have enough proven talent at this point and we don’t need privileged, disconnected directors like James Cameron appropriating Indigenous culture for his stories. We can tell our own stories. We tell them better.

Jason Asenap is a Comanche and Muscogee Creek writer, critic and filmmaker based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.