Audiences across the globe are boycotting Avatar: The Way Of The Water after 'racist' comments by director James Cameron resurfaced.
In an interview with The Guardian in 2010, Cameron said the Lakota Sioux Nation was a "hopeless" and "dead-end society".
The interview was prompted by Cameron's visit to the Xingu tribe, located in the Amazon, who were fighting against the development of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam.
During his time 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.
He noted that 'this was the driving force' in creating Avatar.
"I couldn't help but think that if [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future… and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rate in the nation... because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society – which is what is happening now – they would have fought a lot harder."
Avatar: The Way Of The Water director James Cameron during a press conference at Seoul, South Korea. Credit: Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images
Karuk journalist Chiara Sottile described the comments as "deeply offensive".
"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'," she wrote on Twitter.
"I am not hopeless (I hope for an apology!). Native people are still here, still brilliant."
Accused of 'blueface'
The film has received mixed reviews, with some of the criticism focused on casting.
Black Latina actress Zoe Saldaña and Maori actor Cliff Curtis are the only two non-white people in the film.
Nádleehí and Navajo influencer and co-chair of Indigenous Pride L.A. Yuè Begay described the film as "horrible and racist" on Twitter.
"Our cultures were appropriated in a harmful manner to satisfy some white man's saviour complex," she said.
"Lakota people are powerful."
She said Cameron was "guilty of favouring non-Indigenous folk" in casting for Na'vi the alien race in the film.
Begay described it as 'blueface', a form of "racist caricature".
"A creator appropriates many non-white cultures, blends them together indiscriminately or blatantly, and has white people play or voice them using fiction as a medium to necessitate and validate their world-building."
Na'vi are the race of aliens living on Pandora in the Avatar franchise. Credit: ©Disney
"This is also why it's important to uplift and platform native artists who show that our cultures are far from hopeless dead-end societies so when someone with a big platform says something like this people automatically know it's a lie," he wrote on Twitter.
"The truth of the matter is our cultures are actually quite the opposite of hopeless, dead-end societies."
