Presenter: Samantha Elwood
Mentor: Kirby Brown, English and Native Studies
Oral Presentation
Majors: English and Spanish
Even though The Last of the Mohicans and Avatar occur hundreds of years apart, both try to heal culpability felt by white settler-colonial audiences surrounding the United States’ foundational history of colonialism. The Last of the Mohicans directed by Michael Mann and based off of the novel by James Fenimore Cooper, follows Nathaniel Poe, a frontier man, and his adoptive Native American family, Chingachgook and Uncas, as they walk the line between indifference and concern during the events of the French and Indian war in the mid-18th century. James Cameron’s film Avatar explores the newly discovered world of Pandora and its indigenous people, the Na’vi, through the eyes of Jake Sully, the narrator of the film and the narrative anchor for both species. Both films explore the usually contentious relations between white and Native American society in a more positive and mutual way. The Last of the Mohicans and Avatar attempt to console the colonial anxieties through their depictions of Native Americans as sympathetic, but by mediating these characters through white male protagonists, they naturalize the history of white dominance of Native Americans because whiteness becomes vital to the futurity of the Native American culture.