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Avatar, colonialism, Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said, James Cameron, noble savage, Orientalism, Racism
Continuing my series on cinema and/as exorcism (see more here, here, and here), some thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar, one of the worst Orientalist fantasies in recent memory (though I don’t want to waste many thoughts on such a facile and deluded piece of rubbish) …
Poster for Avatar showing Jake as both colonised and coloniser
I would give a synopsis of the plot, but I don’t need to if you’ve seen Dances with Wolves, Glory, Seven Years in Tibet, Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, The Children of Huang Shi, or any other film where a white European character stumbles into a culture of noble but blinkered primitives and then proceeds to save them not only from his (and it is always his) fellow Europeans, but also from themselves. In Avatar, the protagonist is an ex Marine named Jake, who is sent to a lush planet called Pandora to help run the Na’vi people (essentially three metre tall humanoids with better abs) off of their sacred land so a nameless company can harvest the minerals that lie beneath it. This is that same story, again, though done without any of the subversive gestures that distinguished the recent District 9, which shares a good few plot elements with all of these films but manages to be something other than the standard Orientalist bullshit. From the opening generic tribal drumming, Avatar confirms every last sentence of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism.
Argument one: Avatar is the most astonishingly racist film since Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, perhaps worse even than 300. The film’s noble savages, the Na’vi – many of whom, though they are computer generated motion captures of real actors, are played by non-white actors – are an amalgam of all the noble savage clichés dating back centuries. They are in touch with nature. They believe, in fact, that their planet, Pandora, is one he living organism (Pandora’s bookshops must sell a lot of James Lovelock). They are violent but admirable. They like to hold hands and dance. They are sexually ambiguous. but still sexually appealing. They are superstitious and reliant on magic and all sorts of often brutal rites of passage. These may be noble savages in the film, but they are still savages and the film treats them as savages, as lesser people.
From the costume and character design, the Na’vi are evidently supposed to represent a smattering of oppressed indigenous peoples on Earth, from New Zealand Maori to the Navajo of the American southwest, but in blending all of these cultures into one, the film is guilty of doing exactly what it thinks it is condemning. That each of the cultures that Cameron borrows from the create the Na’vi are vibrant and complete in their own right simply does not matter. What matters is that they aren’t European and thus are an open resource to plunder when trying to define Europe over and against what it is not. This is Orientalism par excellence.
In a final insult, the Na’vi’s beliefs about their planet being a living organism are given endorsement in the film only when these beliefs are proven scientifically. This is the evolutionary narrative of history – out of darkness and into light, ironically, an idea that is deeply rooted in Christianity – in a nutshell. The Na’vi religion is nothing more than primitive science, an accident of insight that needs European systems of valuation for its legitimacy. This is, at the very best, a backhanded compliment and at worst an absolute repudiation of what the film intends. Final thought: if the humans – as one of the generic corporate faces notes – have nothing to offer the Na’vi, then why does Jake, the sympathetic white human Marine, become the long-awaited saviour of the Na’vi? Why tell the story from his standpoint at all? Why not make Neytiri, the main Na’vi figure, the film’s centre? Why not allow the Na’vi to fulfill their own prophecies? Why not allow them to save themselves? Why force them to end the film in a cold-hearted fashion, sending most of the humans home ‘to a dying world’? Why not grant them the courage of their own ecological convictions and allow them to take a hand in saving the Earth?
Argument two: to say that Avatar is ideologically inconsistent is to make a molehill out of a mountain. This is the perfect film for our times, when Barack Obama can make a speech defending a policy of perpetual war while accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace, when there is endlessly debate about climate change that touches on everything except the actual problems behind the crisis (the market is not the solution, people; it is the problem). This is a film that appears to want to be an endorsement of peace but that ends in a fierce and very bloody battle for territory and resources that the audience is supposed to get behind. In a similar fashion, Avatar makes every gesture possible towards valuing nature and the Na’vi are shown – over and over and over again – being ecologically minded and treating Pandora’s animal life with respect; however, in the film’s climactic orgy of violence, Pandora’s Gaia analogue sends all manner of creatures to their deaths in the name of preserving the Na’vi, who are thus obviously the most important creatures on the planet.
This is a major Hollywood studio film – and I do know that Cameron is actually Canadian – that is trying hard to say something genuine about ecology and capitalism but doesn’t know how to say anything that hasn’t been said for the last four or five hundred years. Perhaps, more worryingly, it cannot, given that it is also one of the most expensive films ever made and it will need to recoup its costs largely in the international market, and thus cannot do anything but pander to the lowest worldwide common denominator. This is a deeply confused film that reflects in every surface the convoluted and confused nature of our culture. It is everything that it believes that it is not. We deserve this film, though I wish I could say with any confidence that we deserve better.
Argument three: Avatar is the ultimate in Orientalist fantasy. When Jake opens his eyes at the end of the film, having defeated the Europeans and sent them packing and having fully, literally become one of the Na’vi, he is living out the dreams of every white neo-pagan, Druid, or Wiccan out there who wants to truly recover a past that is, for the most part, a Romantic fantasy that has no roots in history. Unlike Wikus in District 9, who also becomes an oppressed alien but takes up arms against the oppressors because he is a selfish git largely concerned with saving his own ass (a fact that the film is smart enough to admit), Jake is a classic Hollywood hero who is able to be both coloniser and colonised at once. He is a coloniser without the need for guilt or any serious reflection on what he has done (he is instrumental in destroying the Na’vi’s village) but he is also colonised in that he can take part in a fantasy culture where everything is sunshine, simplicity, and sacredness. Jake is liberal guilt made flesh. In all of this, Cameron is ideologically at least the equal of the great Orientalist novelists, from Rudyard Kipling to Joseph Conrad, though these two have the distinct advantage of having been able to actually write.
Zoe Saldana as Neytiri.
The film, on a technological level, is a game-changer, as they like to say. As a narrative and as an example of the colonial gaze, there is nothing in Avatar that is any different, or any better, than eighteenth-century missionary and colonial writings about Egypt or India. This does nothing to exorcise the demons of colonialism or imperialism; indeed, it is a wholehearted embrace of both of these things cloaked in the shell of a protest against them.
To be fair, I’ll throw in a few positives: everything in the film from the production design to the intricately imagined and convincingly rendered worlds, looks amazing (even in two dimensions, as we down here at the ends of the Earth still don’t have a 3-D theatre) and the climactic battle is a stunning achievement in editing, effects, and pacing. Finally, Zoe Saldana as a nine-foot tall Smurf? Still hot as all hell.
The Dunedin School 
Thanks for the review. As I tend to despise James Cameron films (I’m astonished that Aliens is still judged by many critics to be superior to Ridley Scott’s original Alien), I suspect I’ll feel the same as you. Curiously, the movie is getting good reviews even from critics who acknowledge that its politics are suspect — no doubt for the Cameron orgy of special effects and dazzle.
This is an awesome review. I haven’t finished Orientalism yet, but I will over this break.
Top form, Eric.
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I thought so. Thanks for putting it in perspective.
I found the film to be thoroughly enjoyable. And it is not in any way “orientalist”.
And yes the world IS an integrated psycho-physical system in which everything is in one way or another inter-connected, and pervaded by all kinds of energies of varying degrees of subtlety, all of which is Conscious Energy
Conversely your “review” is an affirmation of the power and control seeking barbarism at the root of Western “culture” altogether–including its so called religion.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~spanmod/mural/panel13.html
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~spanmod/mural/panel14.html
Which HAS inevitably brought the world to the brink of both cultural and ecological meltdown
Altogether I would say that it affirms the psycho-physical world view described and pointed to in these references
http://www.fearnomorezoo.org/trees/sacred-trees.php
http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/bridge_to_god/index2.html (on the politics of getting rid of the “old” shamanistic cultures)
http://www.dabase.org/p9rightness.htm
http://www.dabase.org/p2anthro.htm
http://www.beezone.com/AdiDa/reality-humanity.html
John,
I’m not claiming that the noble savages’ view of the world is wrong, just that the film treats any such vision of the world with contempt, which it masks under its seemingly benign and eco-friendly exterior.
If I am a barbarian for calling rubbish rubbish, then so be it.
For a very decent and well-argued look at life as a network, take a look at Eugene Marais’ Soul of the White Ant if you can track down a copy.
Eric
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The movie is what it is because you nice Americans would NEVER watch it, if the story was more realistic.
If the humans who invaded were black, or Asian, or – gasp – Jewish, the movie wouldn’t even be made, because it’d be too “controversial”. Thousands of critics would rise in contempt that the movie promotes racism, that it portrays other races in a shallow, “white” way of action that is “obviously” not the way those people would naturally behave at all.
If the “noble” Na’vi were filthy, satanic cannibals who skinned babies alive for breakfast, would the audience feel any different about the “We likes your shinies, so we’re gunna take ’em, except for Joe, he thinks you’re all right” story?
They obviously would.
Nobody gives a rat’s ass about what white people did and still do to black people in Africa, because those guys are such bad examples to our kiddies. They keep slaughtering each other and all those pretty noble animals, raping and enslaving their neighbor’s daughters, using and selling diamonds and drugs, and worshipping bloodthirsty, satanic gods, so, to the average white American Joe, they DESERVE to be exploited.
Same goes to the Iraqis and Afghans: they’re just a bunch of fanatic muslims, look at them, growing dictators like daisies and blowing each other up every day.
All that American liberals ever say is “Lets get our troops back and let those nice people sort themselves out”. When asked if America should pay for all the destruction and havoc it caused, not a voice is heard, cause no American Joe wants his hard-earned tax money to work for anybody else’s comfort but his. The audience would never buy the idea that someone would actually HELP “evil” natives, the same way they’d never, EVER, admit to ever being “evil” themselves.
And if the Na’vi were, nice or not, to kick humanity’s (a.k.a. America’s) butt back to Earth by themselves, there would be not one American who wouldn’t feel cheated by the movie. Americans can’t handle defeat; Vietnam is still an open sore that won’t heal. Producers damn well know that.
It’s just too easy to criticize Hollywood and its products, with no regard whatsoever to why those products are the way they are. The movies are shallow? Yes, but they’re as shallow as the audience that pays to see them.
Suzana,
As a never-very-proud-of-it American living overseas, even I can be annoyed by your commentary, though I do agree with most of it. We’re not a homogeneous mass of ignorant racists, though there are a lot of those people out there in the US. There are those of us – and we’d never use the word ‘liberal’ as such distinctions mean next to nothing in the American context – who are better than this (and yes, I did mean better).
Blaming the American public for this is a highly reductionist way of looking at the problem, as it is a matter of economics as well as one of culture. American movies make huge profits overseas, and have done for a long time. During the build-up to World War Two, for example, Hollywood producers brought in representatives of the Nazi party to view films about Germany and the growing conflict, just to make sure they would not be too offensive to the German public and would thus turn a healthy profit. This had nothing to do with American anti-Semitism – indeed, the first film to mention the Jewish identity of most of the victims of the Holocaust did not appear for many years after the end of the war – and everything to do with the mercenary character of the culture industry. At least as much as they reflect the tastes and prejudices of the American public, films like Avatar are the way they are because of the logics of globalised capitalistic exchange. Films are, after all, products that are made to be bought and sold.
Given this, if you’re to rant about the kinds of stupidity and short-sightedness that set box-office records over the weekend, rant about everyone who sees it, and everyone who had a hand in making it, not just the American public. What is most disturbing about these kinds of movies is that they are watched in just the kinds of places that have been the most affected by the sorts of attitudes that make Avatar so repellent.
If anything, the film is a fine example of the globalisation of stupidity and the effects of a general European cultural imperialism. There is still a decent worldwide market for quality, historically aware blockbuster cinema, as the success of District 9 and The Dark Knight have shown us. Its just a shame there’s not more of it to watch.
Eric
Me again.
Speaking of fantasies, is not the dominant power and control seeking paradigm, as manifested by the techo-earthlings a fantasy too. Or rather a brutalist death saturated nightmare which has brought the entire world to the brink of eco-catastrophe, and which inevitably destroys every “primitive” culture that it encounters.
Another reference re the feeling-sensitivity at the psychic core of our being, such being the very essence of being fully human.
1. http://www.beezone.com/AdiDa/touch.htm
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Wow Thanks, Awsome review!
But the reason this plot works is that it DOES happen so frequently. It is happening NOW in 3rd world nations. Nations such as the US are actually exploiting native populations and their resources even as we speak. And people in their own nations are also exploiting them.
So to say that this is an old plot is partially true – but only because it continues and continues and continues…
Kev,
The plot is old. The ideology is old. The whole thing is old.
The reason it is so resilient is because yes, it is rooted in history, but also because the myth of the white saviour is a particularly useful one. If we can believe in one Jake Sully, maybe we can feel a little better about exploiting the poor for crass economic interests. This film is not a critique of economic and environmental colonialism as much as it is a justification for it.
If all of this exploitation continues (and it most definitely does), fictions like Avatar and its ilk are in some part to blame.
Eric
Well, maybe believing in Jake Sully makes *you* feel justified. For me, it makes me sad/angry that there is exploitation in the first place. Jake is merely an exemplar of correct action.
If we didn’t have an example of how to act, then we wouldn’t. If we feel some guilt about our actions, only then can we correct them.
As to the Earth military-types in this movie, they are not regular military, they are mercenaries. In our own time, I would hold up Blackwater and their ilk as acting in the same way and with the same attitude as those in the film.
The plot is only old once we stop acting in exploitative manner. Until then, it is a valid plot.
Kev,
I am done with this, but you’re still missing the point here. Jake is in no way an exemplar of correct action. He does too little too late. He is the reason the village is destroyed and so many of the Na’vi killed (including anyone who might have opposed him as a, eventual leader). His later change of heart – largely because he wants to keep his nice piece of native tail – still doesn’t convince me, largely because of the contempt the film shows towards the Na’vi and their ideas.
Military versus mercenary – in a world where many people in the US are forced by lack of economic choice into military service (which has been the case dating back to the Civil War), is there any difference?
If you want to get into this a bit more, go out and read Edward Said’s excellent books Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism for some more perspective.
Eric
No, Jake does what he can when he perceives what is actually going on – pretty early in his deployment actually.
And labeling a plot ‘old’ doesn’t mean it isn’t true-to-life. Romance comedies are ‘old’, but most people live something like them once or more on their lives.
Well, I would say that there is a difference; the regular military have some checks and balances while those in non-governmental units have shown time and again their willingness to not be beholden to limits. Exactly like those portrayed in this movie.
And it is a typical tactic of someone in a disagreement to say they are ‘finished with it’ when they know they are untenable ground (and next you will deny that). I merely let the readers here decide for themselves.
“It is happening NOW in 3rd world nations”
the exploitation of someone else’s resources happens to this day. what isn’t happening, what has never happened, are indigenous culture’s living in harmony with nature.
this is what makes this movie dangerous. it says: if u want to save the planet, leave environmental management to the supreme environmental stewards, the indigenous.
respecting indigenous culture’s, and attempting to right past injustices that have manifest in social disadvantage are admirable and ‘right actions’, but believing indigenous pepoles are ‘noble’ in their relationships with nature requires a dehumanising (that’s racism) on the scale of cameron’s 10 foot blue supermodels.
we need to remember, in the real world that this movie metaphors all the actors are humans.
Kev,
This is an interpretive matter, so there’s necessarily room for disagreement here. I wouldn’t worry about what our readers think, as we have only a few readers most days.
Calling the plot old is not an automatic criticism, but it does allow us to the see the film in relationship to a long history of other stories told by dominant powers about those that they exploit.
Read Said, I encourage you.
Eric
here’s my review. it was a movie. and it was entertaining.
Marc,
How thoughtful, even profound.
You must be so proud.
Eric
Eric (and others): I saw the movie reviewed it, interacting with Eric’s observations. While I have little patience with those who see racism practically everywhere they look, Eric’s obviously right in this case (I mean, really). To those like Marc who are satisfied with Avatar as simply “an entertaining movie”, all I can say is we live in different universes, because for me, it was hardly even that.
What? Nobody noticed the “love interest” would appear to be a fourteen year old if she wasn’t three meters tall and blue? No belly, no hips, no sag to the breasts at all, nipples not prominent, lean, coltish body….. That isn’t the body you will see on many grown women. Where are the feminist decrying the obvious appeal to men’s fantasies of sexual tourism? I bet there are scenes on the cutting room floor showing Jake spurning a G.I. Jane type with big hips and mammary prominence.
I’m trying to decide if this is Pocahontas meets Robinson Crusoe or some ripoff of yet another Japanese classic where the defeated warrior stumbles off the battlefield to be nursed into health by the lovely-but-simple village girl.
The plugging ones tail into the riding beast bit also needs a raised eyebrow.
Can’t we just write the whole thing off as fantasy-porn for bored white people that can’t name any plant they don’t sell at Wallmart? That makes a whole lot more sense.
Thanks for this …
Good points about the nubile nature of the Na’vi women, especially considering that the Orientals, whether they be African, Arab, Navajo, Maori, etc., are often presented in this kind of fiction as child-like. This also goes back centuries.
It is interesting there isn’t a bigger feminist backlash, but maybe most people are just writing the film off as the nonsense that it is. That the film has made more than a billion dollars is just kind of sad.
Eric
I read this blog before I saw the movie and because of the writers comment about the “hot smurf” I almost didn’t go, I knew the film would be sexist. However, I thought maybe just the writer is a sexist. In my opinion being “hot” is not a compliment, it objectifies and degrades women. You could argue that she’s an alien, but then your whole blog would be irrelevant. I also had no desire to see the great white hope story line, regardless I went.
When I first began looking at gender issues, I believed that violence was a byproduct of boyhood socialization. But after listening more closely to men and their families I have come to believe that violence is boyhood socialization. The way we turn boys into men is through injury: we sever them from their mothers, research tells us, far too early. We pull them away from their own expressiveness, from their feelings, from sensitivity to others. The very phrase “be a man” means suck it up and keep going. Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity. -Terrence Real
Patriarchal masculinity teaches men that their self hood has meaning only in relation to the pursuit of external power; such masculinity is a subtext of the dominator role. – Bell hooks
I don’t know about you, but I have certainly had enough of this patriarchal, porn-fantasy, racist, anti gay film. And I agree with pangolin, some eyebrows should be raised about the plugging of ones tail into the riding beast. Do we really need to glorify dominance and rape culture?
Just because we are all treating popular culture seriously and assessing its ideological qualities – including a still-prevalent sexism – this needn’t mean that we give up our sense of humour.
The ‘hot smurf’ comment was intended as a little bit of levity, not a further justification of a worldview the rest of the post is dedicated to deconstructing.
And I’ll thank you for not calling me a sexist …
wonderful comprehensive article about the negatives of the movie… personally, i agree and saw the same thing upon exiting the film.
the problem with this whole entry is your last sentence. way to bring the misogynist, white male perception of women of color; and their bodies, full circle.
bravo.
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Just today, Yahoo commented on the movie’s alleged racism. This part struck me: “Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of the sci-fi Web site io9.com, likened Avatar to the recent film District 9, in which a white man accidentally becomes an alien and then helps save them, and 1984’s Dune, in which a white man becomes an alien Messiah.” District 9 is a bad comparison, however, because the white “hero” is driven by self-serving motives to the end (as Eric pointed out). Dune is a better analogy, though the book remains a landmark classic and great story — as much as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as far as I’m concerned. Accusing Herbert or Twain of racism is like accusing Tolkien of sexism. This is the year 2010: Cameron can be held to better standards in a film trying to promote a positive message.
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In a final insult, the Na’vi’s beliefs about their planet being a living organism are given endorsement in the film only when these beliefs are proven scientifically. This is the evolutionary narrative of history – out of darkness and into light, ironically, an idea that is deeply rooted in Christianity – in a nutshell. The Na’vi religion is nothing more than primitive science, an accident of insight that needs European systems of valuation for its legitimacy.
What is this supposed to mean? Only western people value confirmation and evidence?
I guess you could say that their religion deserves respect irrespective of its evidence, but that is far from clear. I don’t think it takes a white imperialist to realize all the problems that seem to come with religion.
90% of people aren’t going to realize that this is a morality tale. The two droplets of morality added to the movie was not very preachy and might add a spark of imagination to many of its viewers next time we attack a country.
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Eric, I enjoyed the review. I’m just wondering how you fit ‘Glory’ in with these other films. I know this is kind of late, but I was just directed to this blog entry from another site.
Jay,
Glory is more or less another (if cinematically outstanding) version of the ‘tell the story of the colonised/oppressed/dark through the lenses of the coloniser/oppressor/white’ story. Why not tell the whole story from the perspective of Morgan Freeman or Denzel Washington’s character, or, less radically, from the point of view of Andre Braugher’s middle class, cultivated figure?
ERic
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I get the distinct feeling that you disagree with a lot of the political stance presented by this file. Eg. you tend to disagree that colonialism is a force for good, that European culture tends to help those it encounters, that western science actually *is* superiour to most other belief systems it encounters etc. But does the fact that you disagree with the political message of a film mean that it is a *bad* film necessarily?
Another point that occurs to me is that the reason “Orientalist” fantasy is so popular amongst a certain group of westerners is that they have been made to feel so ashamed of their own culture, by constantly being told that they are oppressors/ have no culture etc. that they have to turn elsewhere to get some sort of magic in their lives. Ironically then a major cause of the orientalist fantasy is the preaching of post-colonialists.
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I find many of the responses to Eric’s argument quite inept. The attacks on this anti-orientalist critique of Avatar would seem to be just as weak and ineffective as the American political left’s attacks on, and utter failure to prevent, the ongoing political and cultural calamities that served as inspiration for the story of Avatar.
I also believe that Cameron genuinely wants to attack the orientalist, colonialist, militarist, western narrative that is currently fueling military wars and ecological destruction. But he doesn’t know how to do that other than with the tools and ideas given to him by those very ideologies. Or maybe he does know, but he is constrained by the environment in which such an expensive blockbuster has to be conceived.
In other words and to address a specific element: the movie is lamentably built around a white human male ex-marine saviour either because that’s the only way Cameron felt confident he could tell it, or because it is the only way he could sell it.
I am merely echoing the points made in the review here. I will add, however, that once disconnected from the misguided overall narrative, some things stand up on their own. You already cited the production; Avatar’s portrayal of nature is indeed beautiful and as a kind of exaggerated homage to the bio-diversity of our own planet, it is worth having. Also, putting aside their dubious saviour and the contradictions of the Gaia narrative…if you reduce the Navi to merely victims of invasion and occupation then there is no harm in cheering on the Navi themselves as they justifiably assault these obvious stand-ins for Blackwater Inc. and the US military with nothing but bows and arrows. Substite bows for kalashnikovs and you have real people do the same audacious thing every single day.
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“in the film’s climactic orgy of violence, Pandora’s Gaia analogue sends all manner of creatures to their deaths in the name of preserving the Na’vi, who are thus obviously the most important creatures on the planet.”
this is incorrect. Gaia sends all the other animals because the humans are going to destroy the special tree-of-souls dealio which, sounds like, and is implied to be, a direct attack on Gaia herself. so it’s self-interest, not some announcement that the Na’vi are the most important species on the planet.
you have a lot of hate for something that is clearly a popcorn flick generously borrowing from tried and true tropes. but i think you did a rather poor job in your analysis.
I like the post, however as a New Zealander I would like to know how you feel the Maori people of this country are oppressed. In fact many opportunities are given to them that are not presented to us colonist dogs. They are offered scholarships for attending University purely because of their race and regardless of their socio-economic position, they have access to work opportunities that I would not and they maintain their cultural heritage without interference from the government (apart from the cannibalism, that’s frowned upon.) Grants and benefits are set aside purely for funding of their communities and they are quickly laying claim to land that they haven’t owned for centuries.
I think of myself as a New Zealander, not a European or a European New Zealander. Equality will only come to New Zealand when the Maori begin to see that segregation and separation only harms the nation and that if we were all to view ourselves as New Zealanders, instead of Maori and Pakeha (a word generally used for reference to whites in the country – although roughly translating to ‘white pig’) we would be a more prosperous and generally happier country.
I wish Michael Laws would stop posting here under false names.
Be fair. All Michael Laws is saying is that New Zealand will be a better place as soon as Maori stop being Maori and completely accept and assimilate to the neutral culture free New Zealand which he proposes.
Just because I refuse to feel guilty to be born in a country of which my people are not indigenous doesn’t make me a racist. I’m purely stating that people other than those of Maori or Pacific Island heritage should have access to, and would benefit from, the same level of assistance provided to Maori and Pacific Islanders. You can make slanderous comparisons if you want, but I ask again; how are the Maori oppressed?
“my people”???
But I thought “we were all to view ourselves as New Zealanders, instead of Maori and Pakeha.”
Make up your mind!
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