Over the Christmas weekend, like so many others, I saw James Cameron’s, Avatar. I will be the first to admit the imagery was spectacular. I had already read discussions of the plot, about the anti-corporation and greed messages, and the thinly veiled representation of Native American spirituality. Thus I was not surprised when I saw the film and these points were as prominent as the three-dimensional arrows and objects protruding towards me. Yet, once I was able to think about it, I was deeply disappointed by Cameron’s representation of spirituality because there really isn’t that much in the movie, at least not spirituality as many Native Americans understand it. Instead what was really there was a religious message more familiar than most think.

As Kurt Schlichter so aptly points out, Cameron’s representation of the Na’vi is a pastiche of romanticized noble savage tropes, a group helpless to save themselves and dependent on a hero coming from the very same race that threatens them. While Cameron praises the Na’vi for their connection to nature, he portrays them as ignorant children shooting arrows at flying machines that can withstand the assault. Are the Na’vi really so stupid to keep shooting arrows at the helicopter-like crafts after seeing their initial arrows are useless? Are they really so dumb that it takes exploding missiles to get through to them that they are out gunned? According to Cameron it does. This is the problem. Since the seventeenth century western society has believed children were innocent and through this innocence, they were closer to nature. The Native American were connected to this innocence. Thus, Cameron cannot escape this infantilizing notion and therefore casts the Na’vi as a dumb but spiritually innocent race, part of the planet and in tune with all life.

But this leads to my biggest problem, the representation of Na’vi spirituality. It is the most vague and mostly unspiritual understanding of Native American beliefs. There is a big difference between saying all humanity is one because they share the same creator or were saved from sin by the blood of Christ versus we are all one because we share the same DNA and evolutionary background. Cameron’s unity falls pretty close to the latter. His unity of the “Great Spirit” is not deeply spiritual, as so many reviews discuss, it is neurobiological. Far from some Great Spirit, or Wakan Tanka, Cameron’s unity is the neurobiological matrix that connects all the plants and animals on the planet. As Sigourney Weaver’s character says, “We're not talking about pagan voodoo but something that is real biologically: a global network of neurons.” This is far from Native American spirituality. It would be much more appropriate to point to Gaia explanations common in ecological and climate change debates rooted in biology and materialism.