Like a lot of people in the US, seeing Avatar made me think of native American/European history. Yes, there were a lot of wrongs committed. And yes, a lot of it had to do with diseases.
On HN, bokonist started an interesting thread asking whether it would have been better to turn back the clock and not have ever interacted?
I think that is one legitimate, albeit unrealistic, logical conclusion of our modern moralistic sensibilities. hristov makes the point that a peaceful co-existence would have been possible, but in the same breath talks about assimilation.
Avatar sheds light on both possibilities. As a viewer you're almost screaming for the former where us Earthlings would have never set foot on Pandora. Yet both in the movie and in real life I think it just couldn't have happened that way. There are too many independent variables, i.e. people.
We're always going to have explorers, entrepreneurs, and frontiersmen among us. And society isn't going to stop them from interacting with new things. So while idealistic, I think these alternate histories are dream worlds.
Interaction is inevitable. And with interaction, some degree of assimilation is inevitable.
From the Avatar perspective, assimilation seems pernicious, as it would certainly mean the destruction of at least in part the Navi's day to day life, which is painted so majestically in the movie.
Imagine many peaceful human colonies with their modern technology and economy. Some Navi are intrigued and gradually some start to assimilate--have jobs, trade, etc. Is that progress or a destruction of culture?
Avatar paints the Navi as an essentially homogeneous group. And given that they are not human, I'll let it slide. So back to the native Americans.
As like any human population, native Americans have their own explorers, entrepreneurs, and frontiersmen. Some of these people want to assimilate. Some will have gone home at night wishing that they had been born into the European way of life, and visa-versa.
We like to think of these groups as homogeneous, but in reality they are from it.
