The sequel to the highest-grossing film of all time, Avatar: The Way of Water, has taken the world by storm, making US$134 million in its open weekend here and US$300.5 million internationally for a grand total of $434.5 million.
With some such as PressBooks' Hannah Fitzgerald calling Avatar "just Pocahontas with blue people In space", the tribal aspects in the film drawing responses from native people from across the planet haven't gone unnoticed, with some critics calling out Avatar director James Cameron for cultural appropriation.
Now, with the release of the new Avatar film, comments made by Cameron saying the Lakota Sioux Nation was a "hopeless" and "dead-end society" in an interview with The Guardian in 2010 have resurfaced.
This was after Cameron visited the Xingu Tribe in the Amazon, which was struggling against developers of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam and, while there, he witnessed cultural ceremonies.
"I felt like I was 130 years back in time, watching what the Lakota Sioux might have been saying at a point when they were being pushed and they were being killed and they were being asked to displace," he said then.
'Horrible and racist'
Cameron also said that if the Lakota Sioux in the past were able to see the future of their people and the problems and pressures of modern society causing their kids to have some of the highest suicide rates in the US, “they would have fought a lot harder".
Karuk journalist Chiara Sottile responded to the “deeply offensive" comments on Twitter and rejected the comments: "James Cameron saying the Lakota should have 'fought a lot harder' against forced removal and imperialism, calling Indigenous peoples 'hopeless' and 'a dead-end society"
"I am not hopeless (I hope for an apology!). Native people are still here, still brilliant."
Cameron is also being accused of having white-orientated casting with the only black Latina actress Zoe Saldaña and Aotearoa’s own Cliff Curtis (Ngāti Hauiti, Te Arawa) and Duane Evans Jr (Ngāti Whātua, Ngāpuhi) as the only non-white people cast in the film.
Yuè Begay, Nádleehí and Navajo influencer and co-chair of Indigenous Pride L.A said on Twitter that the new Avatar film was "horrible and racist" and that Cameron was "guilty of favouring non-Indigenous folk" in casting for Na'vi calling it 'Blueface'.