Avatar—the cartoon film that is reality for millions

Many indigenous people, after looking at the new blockbuster, Avatar,
see themselves in the story. They see the storyline of land and human
exploitation as being their story, their history, their pain. The rape
and pillage of land and resources has been the bane of native peoples
since Columbus got lost and ‘discovered’ America.

For millions, 500 years after Columbus and subsequent European
‘explorers’ washed up on these shores, the cycle of resource
exploitation, native annihilation and land piracy continues to play
out. Precious metals, timber, energy resource exploitation, along
with environmental degradation, poisoning of water supplies and air
remain major problems for Native People in North and South America,
and around the world.

They say Avatar is truth.

The Huffington Post noted that the people in Avatar share a great deal
with aboriginal people in South and Central America, as well as
Africa. Just makes me wonder what the writer thinks about the uranium
mines of the Southwest, the dumping of radioactive wastes on
supposedly independent lands, AKA reservations.

Nevertheless, Avatar presents a fictional rendition of an ongoing atrocity.

Avatar is real: Pandora exists in our planet and it's located in South
and Central America, and Africa. The Na'vi peoples, the Indigenous
peoples in those regions are being displaced and killed right now, in
order to extract the natural resources laying underground. The names
of places and peoples may be different in the movie, but the facts of
reality are almost the same. (Huffington Post)

All of the superficial apologies will not change the fact that tens of
millions of native people died horrible deaths in the 400 years of
exploitation, and hundreds of thousands today continue to live in
substandard housing, and face terrorism on their own lands. One state
government is mandating that all state high schools with native names
as mascots, change their mascot names. And the US Mint is
manufacturing another coin to commemorate Native Americans.

Now, that is all well and good, but what about real money? What about
compensation for stolen resources—and we don’t have to go all the way
back to ground zero. Tribes are not receiving their legally
prescribed payments for rents and leases. Invaders continue to
trespass on native lands, without compensating the tribes, and Native
Americans continue to die from radiation poisoning, polluted water and
poisoned land.

Generations still suffer the effects of educide, where Native children
were divested of their native culture in residential torture schools
and returned to their homelands confused, angry, and often mentally
ill. Walk the lands of the Rez, look at the result of homegrown
terrorism, see a people whose heritage was emasculated, whose children
were the victim of a multi-generational eradication/mind control
atrocity, practiced by religious and government run ‘residential
schools.’

Children were murdered, saw their classmates tortured, beaten, killed
and driven to madness. The religious institutions and churches who
perpetrated this atrocity continue to deny, obfuscate and hide their
evil deeds, as the victims of their evil turn to drugs and alcohol to
drive the monsters at bay. Even as they run toothless ‘reconciliation
commissions’, discredit activists and set up stalking horses as
diversions, the truth continues to come out.

Avatar, using cartoon media and a suspension of reality tells the
story of millions of real indigenous victims, but the question is:
will we ignore the message? Will mainstream media and their
sleepwalking audiences fail to connect the reality of today with a
movie plot? Will we feel sorry for people for a tiny moment, then go
back to acceptance and exploitation as usual?

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Monica Davis is an Indiana-based author, columnist and public speaker. She specialises in economic, history and public policy issues and has written articles on land loss, bank failure, environmental justice and alternative energy. She is published in Great Britain, the US and India and home schoolers in New Zealand have used her articles as teaching tools. Ms. Davis has given presentations on land lynching and the farm catastrophe at churches, museums and universities. Her articles been read into the Congressional Record and used as the basis for interviews by other reporters. She is available for speaking engagements. Her email address is:
davis4000_2000 [at] yahoo.com
author web site http://www.lulu.com/davis4000_2000