the avatar movies are crazy bc "what if colonizers literally inhabited and puppeteered the bodies of indigenous peoples in order to exploit their homeland" sounds like the premise of some sort of anticolonial horror film, like specifically the kind of thing that would be commenting on self-indigenization among white settlers, but because it's James Cameron his whole takeaway from that premise is "it would be preddy cool"

actually sorry. the takeaway is also "the white settler possessing an indigenous body would actually be extremely good, perhaps even The Best, at being indigenous, and he would become their Leader"

The takeaway is that James Cameron hired a multi disciplinary team to create the most "alien" culture possible and after years of design what they ended up with just looked like the indigenous population that their Anglo American creators had waged a genocide against decades before. Something unpleasant in the Canadian mind stirred and twisted and managed to summon the ghosts of their own shadow haunted world.

The takeaway is that James Cameron leaned into it. The music they wrote was too foreign sounding, so they substituted "world music" for the Navi - a movie short hand for indigenous sounding. The alien bodies weren't attractive enough to the western male gaze, so Cameron gave them mammalian breasts. This whole narrative about dozens of experts across dozens of fields building the culture of the Navi, while true, is just a distraction from the fact that Cameron designed Pandora and its cute cat eyed blue aliens already.

The takeaway is that dozens of ethnologists, musicologists, archeologists, historians and speculative fiction artists mostly just built baubles and artifacts to be displayed in supplementary materials. A well designed string instrument in the, "World of Pandora," book. A materially sound weaving displayed at the "World of Pandora," theme park. The same colonizer historian who reconstructs Hopi pottery for the Smithsonian, constructs Navi pottery for Disney's Animal Kingdom.

Perhaps you're old enough to remember when the world first met James Cameron's Avatar and the globe was cleaved into two groups; one totally enchanted by this alien paradise, and one that went, "oh so it's Dances With Wolves. Just beat for beat. No it's not Pocahontas, it just looks like Pocahontas because Pocahontas was cribbing the same styles and materials from Dances With Wolves. Come on, Kevin Cosner won the Oscar for Best Picture for this movie it's not an obscure film."

The takeaway is that Avatar is also the dream of white maroonage. The history of colonization is also the history of defection. From James Cameron to Kevin Costner, from the Avatar Fans back to the first Europeans to walk the shores of Turtle Island; people have projected real and imagined freedoms and powers onto the members and first nations found there. That Pandora distills down the dream of a pre-contact, non agrarian and anti-industrial, spiritually rich but materially limited culture and that this distillation just looks like blue Powhatans, well that probably means something.