By Marguerite A. Suozzi
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 27 2010 (IPS)

The blockbuster, critically acclaimed film ‘Avatar’ portrays the ruthless plundering of a pristine ecosystem on a distant planet by greedy corporate interests – a scenario that is all too familiar to many indigenous communities here on Earth.

James Cameron Credit: Courtesy of Broddi

IPS correspondent Marguerite A. Suozzi spoke to director James Cameron at a screening of the film during the ongoing ninth session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Do you think observing nature changing over time impacted the creation of ‘Avatar’? A: I think when you have a sense of a connection to nature, and see what we are doing as a society…you feel a sense of obligation, maybe, and for me it’s a sense of obligation as an artist to say something about it, and I work in commercial entertainment.

Commercial entertainment is normally not the platform that’s used for this type of communication. Normally, it would be documentary filmmaking, but the problem with documentary film is that they’re usually watched by people who already understand the problem, as opposed to a piece of global mass entertainment that will reach everybody. So the attempt with ‘Avatar’, without being preachy and within the context of a story of adventure and so on, was to deal with these themes and give people not just a kind of intellectual reaction, but a powerful, emotional, cathartic film.

Q: How can we reconcile a system that values science, development, progress and discovery, without encroaching upon the rights of indigenous peoples? A: It’s development that encroaches, it’s infrastructure projects like dams and highways and pipelines. It’s effluent, it’s pollution, it’s wastewater from oil processing facilities, and so on. It’s us as consumers and our consumer society which through market forces cause a continuous expansion of our industrial presence, our extraction industries and so on.

It’s not the scientists – the scientists, I think know, certainly, to go in and very, very quietly, and with minimal impact, study, and they learn about the biodiversity of the rainforest. Anthropologists learn about the cultures of indigenous people and so on, in a very non-intrusive way. Whereas extractive industries, major utilities, people like that, they don’t care. If they could do it without any conscience, I believe they would.

There are now some braketo s on that process through the indigenous rights that have been constitutionally established, that have been acknowledged in various declarations and so on, but for the most part, there aren’t teeth in it. There’s not a lot of enforcement and these people are forced to use their own money, and their own resources to fight these legal battles and to push back.

Q: What about using indigenous knowledge in thinking our way out of it? A: I think people tend to bog down on, well, there are certain indigenous shamanic practices that lead us to certain pharmaceutical compounds in the highly bio-diverse rainforest, and there is validity to that. There is specific indigenous knowledge that is almost in a sense intellectual property they should benefit from, that we can benefit from. In other words they should actually profit from the use of that knowledge, but I don’t think that’s the main point.

The main point is that there is a value-system that they naturally have that has allowed them to live in harmony with nature for a long time and those principles, that wisdom, that spiritual connection to the world, that sense of responsibility to each other, that’s the thing that we need to learn. It’s a complete reboot of how we see things. I’m not even sure we can do it, but if there is hope, it lies in our ability to have a sea change in our consciousness – to not take more than we give.

Q: Some have criticised the film for portraying a white male protagonist as the hero who saves the Na’vi. How do you respond to this “white messiah” backlash? A: I don’t buy that, and by the way I don’t think that any of these indigenous people that see their reality in the film felt that at all, or felt that that was an impediment to their enjoyment of the film.

Q: Have you had any reactions from the indigenous community? A: It’s been overwhelmingly positive, overwhelmingly. Maybe that’s pre-selected on the basis of the people that actually come up to me and talk to me, but I haven’t had anybody coming up to me, yelling at me about any kind of white messiah issues.

The thing is that I think people have to distinguish between African American issues in this country where it’s socioeconomic issues dealing with poverty and a voice in the political system, a place at the table – all of those things that have been historically part of that – versus actual survival when bulldozers are knocking down your forest and you have a highly mechanised, industrialised force that’s destroying your world.

When all you’ve got to fight back with is bows and arrows, there has to be intervention from the international community. So I don’t care what race the messiahs are, but we all have to be those messiahs, we have to help these people because you can’t stop a bulldozer with a bow and arrow.

Having said that, it’s absolutely critical that the indigenous leaders themselves have a voice, they are the ones who are brought into the political process, that’s fundamental to this. I don’t want to speak for them.

Q: The latest seems to be that the Belo Monte dam project, which you have been quite vocal against, is going forward. A: It’s hard to say, they haven’t built anything yet. There was a directive against and for that was overturned several times, and I think there was a third injunction against the auction, and it was overturned by the high court on the basis that there was no immediate direct threat to the indigenous because construction had not begun.

What I’m hearing in that is that they’re saying there are other steps to be discussed before the dam actually goes into construction. So as far as I can see, the battle is just getting warmed up. And in fact we didn’t really expect in this round to really prevail, we just expected to do what happened, which was to raise awareness both within Brazil and in the international community. It was on the front page of the New York Times, there is plenty of press on this now.

So now in a funny way it’s in the hands of the NGOs and the legal action within Brazil to try to prevent this, and in the hands of the indigenous leaders who have now been given a bit of a spotlight to speak for themselves.

Excerpt:

Despite having equality on paper, women continue to be shut out of most leadership positions in the United States, and some experts say that the persistence of language in which male is the default gender is an overlooked factor.

Drafting of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Perhaps not coincidentally, the 1776 document states that "all men are created equal." Credit: Copy of engraving by Alonzo Chappel

In the U.S. government, women occupy 16.8 percent of the 535 seats in Congress – 17 percent in the Senate, and 16.8 percent in the House of Representatives – according to statistics published by the Centre for American Women and Politics (CAWP). Some 22.9 percent of the available statewide elective executive offices are occupied by women, and of President Barack Obama’s cabinet of 20 members, four are women.

Gender disparities in the private sector are even more acute.

According to a census taken by Catalyst, an organisation working for greater gender equality in the workforce, women represented only 13.5 percent of the executive officer positions at Fortune 500 companies in 2009, with women holding 6.3 percent of the top earner positions.

Catalyst also found that less than one-fifth of these companies have three or more women in executive positions, and almost one-third of companies have none.

Janet Jakobsen, a professor at Barnard College and the director of the Barnard Centre for Research on Women, says the language we use may play a role in some of these disparities.

“If you look for example at Fortune 500 companies, there is a really serious gender gap that continues,” Jakobsen told IPS.

“What the research shows is that the way that this is produced is not through active ‘I dislike women, I’m going to exclude them from the workplace,’ but simply from the set of assumptions that people go into the workplace with,” she said.

“So when you imagine ‘OK, there are 17 resumes before me for a job, and I see a man and a woman – pretty much the same things, but I can more easily imagine this man doing this job,’ that’s an unconscious bias, it’s an assumption. One of the things language does is to help construct those unconscious biases,” Jakobsen said.

Senator Kathy Sgambati, a Democrat from New Hampshire – the first of the 50 U.S. states to have a legislative body governed by a majority of women – agrees that language is significant in forming opinions about gender. She is in the process of sponsoring a bill that would amend the constitutional language of New Hampshire from gender exclusive to gender-neutral.

Currently, the state constitution begins “All men are born equally free and independent,” but if the legislation passes, it would be amended to read, “All people are born equally free and independent,” removing any doubts about the extent of the constitution’s reach.

“I have watched tours of fourth graders go through the Senate and they always gasp when they are told women are in the majority,” Sgambati told IPS. “It concerns me, because I think when they study the constitution, there are some young girls that don’t see themselves in it,” she said.

“Because of the language, they see governing as expected to be a male-dominated organisation, and it’s not,” Sgambati said. “In New Hampshire, women have a very long history of serving in the House and the Senate.”

California, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont have successfully removed references to gender from their constitutions already.

“This kind of inclusion does matter,” Jakobsen told IPS. “And it matters especially for people who can grow up and imagine themselves as the leaders of our government, as included in these legal documents.”

At the United Nations, where gender equality ranks highly as one of the eight Millennium Development Goals, gender inequity within the organisation persists. One U.N. employee, who spoke to IPS on the condition of anonymity, said the U.N. “has a long way to go in terms of achieving true gender balance,” particularly in high-ranking jobs.

“I often tell colleagues that an organisation that is supposed to defend and promote human rights should do more to make the role of women more visible. That’s why I am outraged at the gender neutrality of the High Commmissioner’s title,” she told IPS, referring to the French translation of the title, which is “Le or La Haut-Commissaire aux droits de l’Homme,” whereas the feminine form would be “La Haute Commissaire aux droits de l’Homme.”

“We should be proud to say it’s a woman! De-genderising the title is a way of saying – in my opinion – that the feminine form would somehow be inferior,” she said.

“I think forums that try to use gender-neutral language have often gone a long way in terms of gender balance and equity. My perception,” she said, “is that the U.N. is not there yet. I think that reflects the spectrum of national realities in member states.”