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Cries With Indians:

Going Indian With the Ecological Indian from Rousseau to Avatar

Robert Baird

Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or, On Education, 1762

The Indian...stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not
her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the
habits of the house. His house is a prison.

Henry David Thoreau, Journal, April 26th, 1841

Since those tumultuous days [1960s], Noble [Ecological] Indians have saturated
public culture. They grace the covers of fiction and nonfiction best-sellers, and
pervade children’s literature. They leap from movies and television screens, fill
canvases, take shape in sculptures, find expression in museum and gallery
exhibitions, animate dance and other performances, and appear in T-shirts. Time
and again the dominant image is of the Indian in nature who understands the
systemic consequences of his actions, feels deep sympathy with all living forms,
and takes steps to conserve so that earth’s harmonies are never imbalanced and
resources never in doubt. This is the Ecological Indian.

—Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History

INTRODUCTION

We have any number of role models for individuals living in nature, from

Thoreau’s successful philosophical excursion at Walden Pond to Chris McCandless’

tragic Alaskan journey chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. Similarly, James

Cameron’s Avatar (at this point, the most technologically sophisticated film in history)

transposes our contemporary view of the ecological Indian onto a science fiction world

created around an indigenous tribal culture of the year 2154 on a massive moon called

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Pandora. Having despoiled Earth, colonizing, strip-mining humans travel to Pandora to

mine a powerful mineral, no matter what the cost to the local inhabitants. Thoreau,

McCandless, and James Cameron, in very distinct ways, each followed the model of the

ecological Indian to assist with their quite different returns to nature. Thoreau most

famously modeled his Walden Pond reverie on lessons and lore from Indians, leaving

unpublished at his death an extensive collection of “Indian Notes.” A tragic figure of our

own age who lacked Thoreau’s literary significance and powers of reflection, but went

deeper into the wild than Thoreau ever did, McCandless trekked into the Alaskan

wilderness with a 22 rifle, a bag of rice, a paperback of Thoreau’s Walden, and a copy of

Tanaina Plantlore by Priscilla Russell Kari, described by the publisher as a

“comprehensive guide [that] includes more than one hundred plants recognized by the

Dena'ina people of Southcentral Alaska.” The bitter irony of McCandless’s death, as

speculated by Jon Krakauer and Chip Brown, was that he starved in the wilderness he

came to subsist upon, perhaps complicated by his failure to distinguish between Indian

Potato (Hedysarum alpinum) and Bear Root (Hedysarum mackenzii) or else

contamination of his meager supplies by mold. It helps to go Indian with Indians.

Like many westerners of the last 500 years who have imagined and practiced

various forms of going Indian, Thoreau, McCandless, and Cameron share with French

Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1721-1778) the belief that American Indians in

particular, and indigenous peoples in general, represent the ideal model for living in

harmony with nature. That any human band can live in equilibrium with nature, even as

an ideal mythos in our heads, represents a potential answer to the dominant, our-very-

existence-hinges-upon-it question of our era: what practices, lifestyles, lifeways, are

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sustainable, and how might we return to them before we ourselves join the megafauna of

the Pleistocene Era as mere fossils and wispy legends.

Even our traditional European and western agrarian ideals, the romantic ideal of

golden harvests as seen in Pieter Bruegel The Elder’s “The Harvesters” (1565), threshing

of wheat by hand, the farm workers resting after their hearty lunch, and more recent

idealizations of the family farm community, have largely been threatened to extinction by

decades of industrial food production, which rests precariously on the ordered, crop row,

mechanized, genetically-modified, and wholesale domestication of nature—not to

mention the petroleum-fueled nitrogen fertilization and chemically controlled mono crops

of contemporary farming. As I write this, the front page of my local Champaign, Illinois

news daily—The News Gazette—carries the story of waste spill into Lone Tree Creek

and Sangamon River from a CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) that led to the

deaths of 40,000 fish and amphibians. Contrast the mass, industrialization of our food

with the small-scale, intuitive, hand-cultivation of Indian Three Sisters companion

plantings of corn, beans, and squash (as does Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s

Dilemma), and our contemporary alienation from nature seems less science fiction or

ecological jeremiad than a legitimate psychological response to our century long slide

into dystopia.

CRITIQUING CRYING INDIANS

America’s most famous Indian. Star of perhaps the best-known public service
announcement ever, he was a black-braided, buckskinned, cigar-store native
come to life, complete with single feather and stoic frown. In the spot’s original
version, launched by Keep America Beautiful on Earth Day 1971, he paddles his

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canoe down a pristine river to booming drumbeats . . . rows into a city harbor:
ship, crane, a scrim of smog. . . pulls his boat onto a bank strewn with litter and
gazes upon a freeway. . . . ‘Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the
natural beauty that was once this country,’ intones a basso profundo voice, ‘and
some people don’t.’ On those words, someone flings a bag of trash from a passing
car. It scatters at the Indian’s feet. He looks into the camera for the money shot. A
single tear rolls down his cheek. ‘People start pollution. People can stop it,’
declares the narrator.

—Ginger Strand, “The Crying Indian: How an Environmental Icon


Helped Sell Cans—And Sell Out Environmentalism.”

From Ginger Strand’s perspective the “genius” of the Crying Indian public service

announcement undercut more dramatic environmental action since its proposed solution

to environmental problems was that individual citizens should stop littering. The “sell

out” of environmentalism, according to Strand, is that the Ad Council and Keep America

Beautiful, producers of the Crying Indian PSA, actively served the business interests of

the disposable can industry at the expense of refillable bottles. For Strand and others like

documentary filmmaker Heather Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage,

and author Elizabeth Royte, Garbage Land, the Keep America Beautiful organization and

its Crying Indian public service campaign, with its corporate backing of producers of

disposables, represents a form of greenwashing, the use of marketing, advertising, and

public relations to sell a company or organization as environmentally friendly when the

truth is less positive or even environmentally negative. For Strand, the most famous

crying environmental Indian of the last century is compromised not only because the

actor, Iron Eyes Cody, was actually Italian-American Espera Oscar DeCorti, but also

because:

The Ad Council’s volunteer coordinator for the Keep America Beautiful


campaign was an executive from the American Can Company. With him at the

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helm, a new ad agency was brought in—Marsteller, who happened to be
American Can’s own ad agency. The visual arm of Burson-Marsteller, the global
public relations firm famous for its list of clients with environment-related
publicity problems, Marsteller crafted the new approach. The crying Indian
campaign, premiering on Earth Day 1971, had it all: a heart-wrenching central
figure, an appeal to mythic America, and a catchy slogan. There was a pro forma
gesture in the direction of ecology—the Indian paddles by some belching
smokestacks, after all—and the language had shifted from “littering” to
“pollution.” But the message was the same: quit tossing coffee cups out of the
window of your Chevy Chevelle, you pig, and America’s environmental problems
will end.

Strand does acknowledge the power of the Crying Indian PSA, its message coming across

that “What we’ve done to this land is not right, and Indians know it, because we did it to

them, too.” For viewers, “a dark possibility opens up: our way of life is destructive. The

cars, the pollution, the factories: it’s not, despite what we’ve been told, the best of all

possible worlds. Something must change.” Indeed, a contemporary re-viewing of the

Crying Indian PSA on YouTube highlights the ad’s effectiveness and ability, still, to

incite moral indignation. After Avatar’s successful translation of the crying ecological

Indian into the science fiction film it is now obvious that the Crying Indian PSA from

1971 was an effective, early environmental jeremiad in the form of science fiction. In the

style of an Indian Rip Van Winkle, who has awakened years later, or time traveled by

traditional canoe to a 1970s America of polluted rivers, belching smoke stacks, and

clogged and trash-strewn highways, Italian-American actor Espera Oscar DeCorti

inspired millions of American viewers to look, regretfully, upon their sleek, modern

world.

In his powerful and controversial book The Ecological Indian: Myth and History,

Shepard Krech sought to undercut the idealized and romanticized view of Indians in

harmony with nature by comparing the poetry to the history. In reviews of numerous

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historical and archeological findings from multiple sources, Krech was able to show that

real Indians in history, even pre-1492 contact, had often acted in ways inconsistent with

our contemporary understandings of ecology and conservation. Surveying the hotly

debated possibility that Pleistocene hunters of mega fauna such as Mammoths and Giant

Sloths may have contributed wholly or partially to their extinction, the ecological

struggles of the Hohokam with salt buildup in their extensive irrigation systems, and

many well-documented examples of Indians who assisted in the European-controlled

markets for beaver, deer, and bison, Krech argues that Indians were not ecological

“saints” or the first conservationists, but real people making difficult decisions as they

employed a very sophisticated appreciation of nature. In the years following his major

publication, Krech’s work suffered abuse from both extreme political ends of the Culture

wars, with rightwing talk radio hosts and political organizations co-opting his findings to

argue, in effect, see, Indians are no better than western industrial folks in there

relationship to nature. Meanwhile, some environmentalists and Indian activists on the

left saw Krech’s diminishment of the ecological Indian ideal, and his interpretations of

history, as a frontal assault on their beliefs, cultures, and contemporary autonomy and

stewardship of land, resources, and hunting and fishing rights. An excellent historian,

Krech’s basic reading of the historical record is correct: both pre-1492 and contemporary

Indians were and are real people with complex and diverse relationships with nature, and

some historical Indian practices (buffalo jumps, where some amount of the kill was

wasted; and the use of fire to alter the landscape, which sometimes got out of hand and

destroyed more than was intended) seem, from contemporary conservation and ecological

perspectives, as less than ideal. That noted, the tremendous gulf between pre-1492

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Indians and their environment and our own post-colonial, post-industrial, post-petroleum

environment and behaviors seems monumental, almost as different as, say, Earth from

Pandora.

No, the main problem with Krech’s critique of the ecological Indian is his belief

that he can, with only “objective” history and science at his disposal, judge an entire

swath of history, and the infinitely complex relationship of an entire continent of peoples

with nature, using a patchwork historical and archeological record missing entire

purviews, and without the aid of the imagination. More forcefully, Krech does make

bold conceptual leaps, continent-wide and eon-long generalizations, and ethical

judgments and, ultimately, crafts a narrative broad sweep worthy of any storyteller.

Krech doesn’t realize that if removes the ecological Indian from existence, it will be

necessary to invent him, and for all our sakes.

Krech is right to emphasize that one problem with idealizations and cherished

myths is that daily practices and careful readings of history can undercut them; from there

it is not too difficult to cynically throw our ideals out as compromised and for real people

to fail to stand up to idealistic perfection. So while we have idealized American Indians

in the environment for centuries, from Rousseau to Avatar, we also have centuries of

explicit politically-driven critiques of Indians’ environmental behaviors as when U.S.

officials critiqued tribes for failures of conservation awareness, practice, results. Most

significantly, we have the perpetual tension between the real lives and practices of tribal

peoples contrasted with impossible ideals and standards set within the ecological Indian.

Like a strange version of the one-drop blood quantum, a single slip by real tribal peoples

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in the realm of environmental relations leads some to the conclusion that indigenous

relations to the environment are therefore equivalent to western, industrial practices. This

simplistic dichotomy and us-them binary is, of course, a major failing and perpetual

problem of our contemporary politics and discourse. The point I will argue here is that

the idealized ecological Indian of literature and cinema continues to serve us as a beacon

and collective psychological rallying point within our long lamentation of our

annihilation and transformation of nature. Every culture in history seems to have

struggled with conflicted stances toward nature, engaging simultaneously in aspects of

living with and working against nature. Native ways (see Easter Islanders, the Hohokam,

and the Anasazi) did not always insure adaptability, survivability, conservation, or

harmony or symbiosis. That said, the gulf between the embedded-in-nature stance of

historical and contemporary indigenous peoples contrasted with our highly urbanized,

post-industrial, information-age cocoons represents a significant difference in degree that

largely accounts for our current alienations from nature and our Avatar-style idealizations

of the ecological Indian.

ROUSSEAU AND THE IMPOSSIBLE RETURN TO NATURE

I propose to show my fellows a man as nature made him, and this man shall be
myself.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, 1770

French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about the noble savage and

humanity’s relationship to nature are frequently treated as caricatures and simplifications,

when they are, in fact, more complex, serious, and relevant to modern thought than we

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give credit. Rousseau most certainly did believe that indigenous peoples were closer to

nature and, therefore, stronger, more content, and egalitarian than any person suffering

from the virtues of civilization. Like many cultures and philosophers, Rousseau sought

to identify a fall in humanity’s history from a previous state of original harmony to a

current state of messy advances and moral failings. Yet Rousseau did not, as the

common caricature of his thought holds, believe that a simple return to nature was

possible. Indeed, Rousseau’s thought was far from naïve and sentimental in this regard

as he argued insistently that it was impossible to return to nature and our original state by

direct means. It was only by indirect means and through our modern, civilized states of

being that Rousseau felt we could get somewhat closer. For Rousseau, it was an act of

the imagination and our ways of being that might improve our fallen state. It is in this

regard that we should give Rousseau credit for the “original story” behind all the

subsequent narratives—from Deerslayer to Avatar. These stories situate our hopes for

reconciling humanity’s place in nature by going Indian with the ecological Indian.

AVATAR: RETURNING TO NATURE VIA THE PAST AS FUTURE

The message has definitely been resonating with people . . . A large part of the
appeal of the movie is it speaks to something that people know is true. It may take
place on a fictional planet, but it's a story that definitely happens on Earth.

Cristina Johnson, Sierra Club spokesperson, New York Daily News

It is helpful to think of stories and films devoted to imagining humanity living

originally and harmoniously in nature, as machines. Like our entire, human-built,

modern world, these films, these returns to nature are human creations that perform

rhetorical, emotional, political, and economic functions, or work. They magnify,

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enhance, amplify, and improve on nature. They are time capsules, museums, zoological

parks, and textual, celluloid, digital time travel machines of our imagination. If we begin

with the latest of these machines, James Cameron’s 2009 film, Avatar, then our cold

analysis will not seem so callous or academic. Avatar is our culture’s latest, greatest

achievement in machine storytelling. It utilizes the newest digital, 3D technologies

alongside centuries’ worth of mechanical entertainment technologies, from video assist to

theatrical lighting to stagecraft. Indeed, it is one of the points of this essay that it is

Avatar’s nearly complete success as a self-enclosed virtual entertainment machine that

makes it able to render an enhanced nature and refashion the noble savage of past films.

This, perhaps, drives the director, film crew, global audience toward a frenetic, desperate,

and ultimately hopeless return to nature via machine. As our global virtual world

expands in proportion to the shrinkage of nature, our future selves, or, perhaps, Na’vi-like

anthropologists from another world, may find in Avatar a cultural artifact that

simultaneously, paradoxically celebrates the ability to manufacture a compelling and

inhabitable virtual nature, even as it laments and dreams one last great return to nature.

Avatar begins, in its theatrical release versions, with a flyover of a misty jungle

forest (Pandora) and our hero, paraplegic Marine Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington’s)

voice-over: “When I was lying there in the V.A. hospital with a big hole blown through

the middle of my life. I started having these dreams of flying—I was free! Sooner or

later, though, you always have to wake up.” Next, this lush dream flight over verdant

jungle is contrasted with the antiseptic, completely technological world of the interior of

a deep space exploration ship, the crew in cryogenic hibernation for nearly six years,

totally dependent on machines and artificial environments. The crew awakens and floats

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out of their sleeping pods in zero gravity. We see no plants or animals—all is

mechanical and electronic. Avatar will continue to juxtapose the technological world of

the colonists of Earth with the natural world of the Pandoran Na’vi; interestingly,

Cameron claims that the great cost (over 300 million dollars) and length of his production

(four and one half years) are due to this extensive and rigorous creation and fabrication of

essentially two distinct worlds within a single film.

In Avatar’s extended collector’s edition DVD release an alternate opening

sequence showing Jake Sully on earth, just before his departure to Pandora, presents even

more explicit a contrast between a verdant nature and a fallen urban dystopia. In the

alternate opening, Cameron borrows heavily from Blade Runner’s dystopian urban

landscape of total congestion, pollution, ubiquitous neon advertising, and gritty night life.

A wheel-chair bound vet, shades of Lt. Dan in Forrest Gump, Jake Sully spends his time

drinking and fighting in bars and returning to his tiny apartment, where space and style

and comfort have been sacrificed for a flat panel television that takes up an entire wall

only 5 feet from his bed. Beautifully, magnificently, baby tiger cubs (cloned at the

Bejing Zoo) play on his gargantuan screen, the only flora or fauna seen in the entire Earth

opening, sad reminders of awe and fear inspiring predators, “Monster of God” (to

reference the outstanding naturalist writer David Quammen’s book), that once roamed

freely on Earth, and, we will soon see, dominate the Pandoran ecosystem.

Inspired by Cameron to imagine a wholly new natural world populated with

marvelous flora and fauna, Avatar’s designers seemed to borrow heavily from

Spielberg’s dinosaur successes in the Jurasic Park series, even as they tried to top that

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big budget blockbuster with their own imaginative enhancements. In the spirit of the

blockbuster action spectacle, Avatar did Jurassic Park one better in combining it’s story,

invented fauna, and special effects creations around the conceit of Na’vi taming and

flying pterodactyl-like Mountain Banshees, a richly evocative trope that satisfied the

demands of a global cinematic spectacle, but also contrasted powerfully with the aerial

gun ships and space craft of the human, “Sky People” invaders. More subtly, but most

significant for this essay, Avatar’s Banshee flying Na’vi reinterpreted American Indian

tribal cosmology and clan totems of Eagle, Raven, and Hawk and also the historical

domestication and incorporation of feral Spanish horses into plains Indian culture. By

having each Na’vi ritually tame and form a “network” bond with each Mountain

Banshee, Cameron and his designers and storytellers took an imaginative leap that

elegantly combined numerous worlds: blockbuster spectacles, science fiction

convention, Indian religions and history, video games and virtual worlds, and network,

cyberspace analogies with biological systems.

Jake Sully lands on Pandora with a militarized security team, reminiscent of

Cameron’s Aliens, where heavily armed space soldiers follow a tactical landing in order

to eradicate aliens on distant planets. On Pandora, the humans must don oxygen masks

and are quickly marched into the well-secured human colony, which is part forward

operating military base (a Pandoran Fort Apache or Khe Sanh of Vietnam) and part

industrial outpost (smog-belching refinery), a Mordor-like nightmare projection of the

US military-industrial colonial commercial enterprise. Restricted to his wheel chair,

Sully uses a genetically sympathetic Na’vi body as his flesh-and-blood avatar. On his

very first time using his avatar, Jake revels in his regained ability to walk and breaks free

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of the operating room, escapes outside into the compound, runs through a garden,

enjoying both the return to full mobility as well as his new world. This contrast with a

military industrial dystopia and the yearning for a pre-fall, direct and immediate relation

with nature is the central idealized mythos of the film. This ideal is starkly contrasted

with the film’s central nightmare: the threat of our becoming completely entombed in

our own technological, militarized, and corporatized environment, to the exclusion of any

vestige of nature, save images of cloned tigers on our wall-sized televisions. The pathos

and paradox of Avatar is that both Cameron and his global audience certainly shared a

basic understanding that our return to nature was made possible wholly by the self-

enclosed technological entertainment apparatus Cameron literally invented for us.

Besting our great natural history museums with its sense of presence within a believable

“natural” world that is, entirely and only, the latest, greatest flicker of light on Plato’s

cave wall, Avatar is, partly, a glorious reminder of what once was and is gone forever.

Since there does remain enough real nature outside Avatar’s virtual space that we can

experience firsthand, and fight for, Avatar’s message and experiential effects in service of

an ecological jeremiad, and a very-late-in-the-game warning of environmental

catastrophe might actually outweigh the film’s carbon footprint and amazingly successful

seduction of the virtual over the real.

One of the most interesting aspects of Avatar is the way in which Cameron and

his team have used their imaginations and cinematic virtual prowess to create a Pandoran

nature that is as amplified, jacked up, and just as “larger than life” as the mechanical,

militarized, fantasy spectacles that are the calling card of science fiction, graphic novels,

and video games. In Avatar, the Pandoran plants, wildlife, and indigenous must compete,

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and ultimately prevail against, the hyperbolized gun ships, mech suits (AMP suits:

Amplified Mobility Platform suits), space craft, weapons, and technological gizmos

familiar from Cameron’s own Aliens to countless video games such as Mechwarrior,

World of Warcraft, and Halo. Nature is amplified, enhanced, re-imagined and made as

compelling and “pumped up” as any other video game element. Pandoran

bioluminescence is an explosion of light, whereby all the flora and fauna of the planet

engage in a fireworks show and glow of lights that is visible from space.

When asked by New York Daily News reporter Ethan Sacks about the difference

between his own Avatar and The Day After Tomorrow (both of which use the blockbuster

science fiction film as a cautionary tale regarding human impacts on the environment)

James Cameron forcefully rejected the comparison: "’The Day After Tomorrow' was

crap science. It was ridiculous, so it was fairly easily dismissed . . . The thing about

'Avatar' is there is no science. There's no attempt to teach you anything.” Cameron’s

next point highlights his awareness of the difference between science and fiction. As one

of Hollywood’s most scientifically-focused and engineering-based directors and

craftsmen, and one who has been known for a monumental commitment toward

believable and plausible worlds, including years of design and fabrication of the

Pandoran flora and fauna, Cameron fully acknowledges and embraces his storyteller’s

role as imaginary architect: "The only thing that 'Avatar' does, and I think it does it very

effectively, is it gives you a sense of moral outrage, a powerful emotional response to

something that as any human being with a conscience you probably already feel."

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As the latest expression of the noble savage and going Indian myths, Avatar

works like so many other narratives in these domains, functioning to express the grief of

lost nature and alienation from being in nature. All humans develop the capacity to

grieve death and lament their awareness of and perpetual distance from animal existence

in nature. Consciousness (partaking of The Tree of Knowledge) is to be aware of our

place in nature, and, therefore, to begin to build ramparts, both physical and imaginative,

that separate our consciousness from nature and our animal being.

AVATAR IN THE TREES

May 9. Sunday [1841]. The pine stands in the woods like an Indian, - untamed,
with a fantastic wildness about it, even in the clearings. If an Indian warrior were
well painted, with pines in the background, he would seem to blend with the trees,
and make a harmonious expression. The pitch pines are the ghosts of Philip and
Massasoit. The white pine has the smoother features of the squaw.

Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, Chapter 5

In “Nature As a Model for American Indian Societies” Marsha C. Bol notes

how such disparate Indian dwellings as tipis, earth lodges, and hogans arose from

unique cultural traditions, but ultimately highlight a common practice wherein “Many

Native people have planned and constructed their dwellings as a microcosm of the

universe. They aligned their houses with the cardinal directions, used lodge poles as

pathways linking the heavens to the Earth, and built domed roofs in the image of the

bowl of the sky.” The natural materials of traditional Indian dwellings are, like the

nests of birds and beaver lodges, literally parts of nature repurposed and reassembled.

Indian dwellings built of natural materials and following traditional building practices

represent an ideal of human nature symbiosis that continues to engage our

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imaginations even as most Indians and non-Indians rely on ever greater amounts of

mass-produced and pre-fabricated dwelling materials and lived environments. In this

context it is not surprising that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, likely the most

famous contemporary home on the North American continent, heroically attempts to

bridge this chasm between modern construction materials and practices and a physical

and aesthetic position within nature by such bold methods as building the home on top

of an active water fall, incorporating native rocks that protrude into the living area,

and glass windows that connect seamlessly into rock via carefully cut recesses.

In Avatar this dwelling with and in Nature has been taken literally back to a

primeval human origin story: humans inhabiting trees. According to Avatar: A

Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora, the Na’vi’s

Hometree is over 325 meters tall, is the “spiritual and physical home of the Omaticaya

clan,” and is “two to three times the height of the Terran redwoods that once covered

the Pacific Northwest. The circumference of Hometree is great enough to house

dozens of clan members. The tree is honeycombed with natural hollows and alcoves

in which the Na’vi sleep, eat, weave, dance, and celebrate their connection to Eywa.”

The Na’vi inhabit Hometree by convening collectively within the amphitheater-like

openings of its base, climbing into Hometree, and sleeping in hammocks—which

close around their bodies to the touch as if animate. These hammocks, according to

Avatar: A Confidential Report, have two Na’vi names, which can be translated as

“Eywa cradles everyone” and “Safe in the arms of Eywa” (38). The massive

Hometree, however, is not the most significant tree to the Na’vi. The Tree of Souls, a

willow-like tree of light that can connect with any life form on Pandora, is considered

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by the Na’vi as their most sacred site, and it is this location that serves at the film’s

final battle sequence and final scenes where the human bodies of Grace and Jake are

brought to connect and transfer back into their avatar bodies, a natural method of

connection and transfer that contrasts markedly with the technology-based “linking”

achieved by the humans. The literalness and simplicity of Avatar’s tree hugging has

been critiqued as part and parcel of the film’s overall commitment to didactic,

stereotypic superficiality. In some areas this critique is well founded; surprisingly,

many scenes cut from the original theatrical version and now available via DVD

suggest a more complex and morally ambiguous film, including a scene where the

Na’vi massacre the mining crew that assaulted Hometree. In the end, Avatar’s

insistence on re-imagining a full-bodied tree hugging seems one of the film’s most

ambitious, and, if you will, deep-rooted explorations of imagining a place in nature.

In one of Avatar’s most stark and literal juxtapositions of conflicting

environmental and industrial perspectives, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver)

argues with RDA executive Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) about the value of

Pandora’s trees, hoping to persuade him from directing his fully militarized “security

forces” from attacking the Na’vi’s most sacred Tree of Souls. Most revealing is the

fact that the general rhetorical positions and sarcastic barbs displayed here could work

in almost any debate between environmental and business concerns of the last 100

years:

Dr. Grace Augustine: Those trees were sacred to the Omaticaya in a way you

can't imagine.

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Selfridge: You know what? You throw a stick in the air around here it falls on

some sacred fern, for Christ's sake!

Dr. Grace Augustine: I'm not talking about pagan voodoo here. I'm talking

about something real and measurable in the biology of the forest.

Selfridge: Which is what exactly?

Dr. Grace Augustine: What we think we know is that there's some kind of

electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the

synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the

trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora.

Selfridge: That's a lot, I'm guessing.

Dr. Grace Augustine: That's more connections than the human brain. You get

it? It's a network—a global network. And the Na'vi can access it—they can

upload and download data, memories, at sites like the one you just destroyed.

Selfridge: What the hell have you people been smoking out there? They're just

goddamn trees.

Dr. Grace Augustine: You need to wake up, Parker. The wealth of this world

isn't in the ground—it's all around us. The Na'vi know that, and they're fighting

to defend it. If you want to share this world with them, you need to understand

them.

Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

represents a work of monumental ambition and scope aimed at a mass audience and

carrying a cautionary message aimed at warding off ecological and social catastrophe.

Most revealingly, trees are at the center of both stories. In Diamond’s historical and

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global span from the Anasazi and Mayan, to the Easter Islanders and Vikings, to

contemporary Montana and China, deforestation is either central to the collapse of

various historical societies (Anasazi; Easter Islanders) or a key barometer of cultural

and ecological health (Rwanda; Haiti). It may not be overly simplistic to say that,

according to Diamond and many historians and environmental scientists, cultures that

fail to address unconstrained deforestation are blundering toward collapse.

AVATAR AS POP CULTURE COSMOLOGY AND DEEP ECOLOGY

I certainly feel a personal sense of responsibility because I made a movie on these


issues [environmentalism] . . . Why? Because they were personally important to
me. It's not like the studio said, 'Jim we want you to make a movie about the
environment.' No. … They said, 'We really like the big epic science fiction story,
but is there any way we can get this tree-hugging crap out of it?'

James Cameron on Avatar as quoted in The New York Daily News

It would be a mistake to understand Avatar as we do many other global

Hollywood entertainment experiences, which are situated largely within a secularized

world and diluted philosophical message. Likewise, it would be a mistake to diminish

the sincerity with which Avatar explores ethical and spiritual expressions. While its use

of traditional religions is muted, Avatar’s embrace of animism, indigenous religions, and

New Age thought is not merely cosmetic adornment and affectation. In many ways,

Avatar represents a very conscious attempt to present a pop culture expression of deep

ecology for the masses. With its story of space travel and discovery of an Earth-like

indigenous past within a science fiction dystopia, (into the future to rediscover our past),

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Avatar is also a pop culture cosmology, an attempt to explain where we came from, and

where we are going.

Arne Naess introduced the concept of deep ecology in 1973 to address

mainstream ecology’s restrictive focus on science alone with an ecosophy that considers

our relationship with nature within a philosophy, an ethical system, and a search for

wisdom. Currently, deep ecology is evident in much of the rhetoric and thought of the

green movement, environmental activism, and New Age religious beliefs. Like

Rousseau, who answered the question of why we have inequality among peoples with his

argument that man fell from a pure relationship with nature and created debilitating

civilizations, deep ecology similarly is founded on the ideal of equality for all, this time

borrowing from animism the ideal that all animate and inanimate elements of nature are

equal. All things in nature have a right to exist and thrive. This is, in many ways, the

antithesis of the Judeo-Christian reading of man as sovereign over nature or the largely

anthropocentric stance of post-industrial, scientific ideology. For Naess and other deep

ecologists, even the more benign idea of Christian stewardship of nature is seen as a

dominating, domineering relationship. In Avatar the Na’vi of Pandora practice a well-

articulated deep ecology. In reflecting on the great separation between our contemporary

environmental contexts and the fictional world of Pandora and the historical practices of

Indian tribes it is very easy to doubt a return to nature or even the possibility of saving

some greater part of nature. Rousseau was right; we can never return fully to nature.

And, too, imaginative flights of fancy such as Avatar are merely that. Yet there is

something of Pandora still on Earth. Following the global success of Avatar, James

Cameron lent his celebrity to support Amazonian indigenous tribes who are fighting the

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proposed 17 billion dollar Bello Monte Dam project on Brazil’s Xingu River. In a

twenty-minute documentary included in the Avatar Collector’s Edition DVD called “A

Message From Pandora” James Cameron recounts his visits to the Kayapo tribe in Brazil

and suggests his own hopes about where we go from here. Cameron follows Rousseau’s

appreciation that we can’t return naively to nature:

And I’m not saying we have to abandon the cities and go strip off all our clothes and try
to run out into the forest and live like the Kayapo. That’s not going to work; and the
Kayapo don’t want us there. Plus, we wouldn’t know how to do it. We’ve severed the
connection to the ancient knowledge that’s necessary to do that.

His hopes for our future, like his film, follows from his faith that we can reconcile the

best of technology and nature:

What we have to do is we have to transform ourselves yet again, into something that’s
never existed on this planet before, which is kind of a techno-indigenous people. We
have all our technology. We’ll use high technology and science to provide us with the
energy that we need, but they’ll be sustainable solutions. Nature’s not our enemy; it’s
our sustenance and we need it and we need nature healthy for us to be healthy and to
survive, long term. And that’s the realization we have to come to and that’s the next
stage of evolution that we have to reach.

Perhaps the universality recognized in Avatar and other treatments of the ecological

Indian is more than just narrative convention; perhaps the challenge to establish a place in

nature and with nature is just that, eternal.

Works Cited

21
Baird, Robert. "‘Going Indian:’ In and Around Dances With Wolves." Dressing in

Feathers: The Construction of "the Indian" in American Popular Culture. Edited by

Elizabeth Bird (Westview Press, 1996): 195-209.

Bol, Marsha C. Ed. Stars Above, Earth Below: American Indians and Nature. Niwot,

Colorado: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1998.

Brown, Chip. Feb. 8th, 1993. “I Now Walk Into the Wild.” The New Yorker.

Diamond, Jared. 2004. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York:

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Editors Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr. 1987. The

Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press.

. . . Nature, Addresses, And Lectures. Edited by Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R.

Ferguson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press, 1979.

Ethan, Sacks. “James Cameron uses Earth Day Release of 'Avatar' DVD to Promote

Environmental Crusade.” New York Daily News, April 22nd, 2010.

Garennes, Christine Des. 2010. Agency Ups Monitoring of Large Livestock Farms. The

News-Gazette, November 21: 1,8.

Krakauer, Jon. 1996. Into the Wild. New York: Villard.


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Krech, Shepard. 1999. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: W.W.

Norton & Company.

Martin, Calvin. “The American Indian as Miscast Ecologist.” The History Teacher.

Vol. 14, No. 2, Feb. 1981): 243-252.

Quammen, David. 2003. Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of

History and the Mind. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Rogers, Heather. 2005. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New York: The

New Press.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1997. Rousseau: ‘The Social Contract’ and Other Later

Political Writings. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press.

Royte, Elizabeth. 2005. Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash. New York:

Little, Brown and Company.

Scott, Austin. "The ''Nature'' of Rousseau: Towards an Understanding and Amelioration

of the Human Relationship to the Environment" Paper presented at the annual meeting of

the Western Political Science Association, Manchester Hyatt, San Diego, California,

March 20th, 2008. http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p237827_index.html

Strand, Ginger. “The Crying Indian: How an Environmental Icon Helped Sell Cans—

And Sell Out Environmentalism.” Orion Magazine, Nov/Dec 2008.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3642/

Thoreau, Henry David. 1906. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Houghton

Mifflin Co.

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Wilhelm, Maria and Dirk Mathison. 2009. Avatar: A Confidential Report on the

Biological and Social History of Pandora. New York: Harper Collins.

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