The Na'vi vs. The Tlaxcaltecs

Why Colonialism is not a Morality Play

A few weeks ago, I spent the last evening of my winter vacation in the movie theater, watching Avatar: The Way of Water. This was the (very) long awaited sequel to James Cameron’s 2009 Avatar, and nobody who knows how sequels work will be surprised to hear me say that the new Avatar’s plot did not include nearly so much character development as its predecessor’s. We had already seen Jake Sully’s transformation from a mercenary lowlife to a chieftain of the ten-foot-tall, blue-skinned Na’vi; now, we mostly just got to watch three hours of the Na’vi in action.

The movie had plenty of beautiful scenes, and even some heartfelt moments. Ironically  (considering Hollywood’s liberal bent) much of this can be chalked up to what I call “trad envy.” Basically, a lot of people like the idea of living in a society of manly men and womanly women, who mate for life and raise large families, and where loyalty to one’s family matters more than personal gratification. They admire cultures where a father is the main educator of his children, where daily life is full of sacred rituals, where everybody is involved in hunting or growing food, where the notion of dulce et decorum est is never far from a young man’s heart, and where the people accept the deaths of their loved ones stoically, in the knowledge that their life force is borrowed from a higher power, to which they all must sooner or later return.

Now, it is worth noting that this kind of life is not only to be found among hunter-gatherers; it is also how the majority of colonial and 19^th century Americans lived, as well as their forebears all over Christian Europe. So when people in the movie industry choose to portray all of this as something that is best achieved in another star system, by creatures with very different biology than our own, it makes one wonder: How much of this is an attempt to avoid thinking about the fact that they could live this way, here on earth, in their own bodies… if they had the courage to walk away from whatever it is they’re doing instead?

And yet, on the whole, the worldbuilding of the Avatar films is hardly immaculate. Despite the stunning visuals, and the mostly-accurate astronomy and biology, there are too many seams left uncovered, too many parts that just don’t fit together. The problem is not really the colonialist greed of the “sky people” (i.e. humans) – after all, there are plenty of historical precedents for that. But there are still some questions that are hard to answer.

For instance: how did the Na’vi – who, like the Malacandrians in C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, are apparently living on what Christians would call an unfallen world – get their martial prowess? Where did all of their knowledge of strategy and tactics come from? Why are their young men so excited about being led into battle? Why does their culture have that snarling ritual which they use, over and over again, to show their enemies that the time for words is over?

If you want to tell an exciting story about explorers or colonizers encountering savages (noble savages or otherwise) then at least some of your savages have to be warlike – otherwise you wouldn’t have much of a story. And when real-life conquistadors like Hernán Cortés and Ferdinand Magellan repeatedly found themselves on the brink of death as they faced brave and disciplined armies of Maya, Aztecs, Mactanese, and other hostile natives, there was a pretty straightforward explanation for why those people had so much martial vigor.

The New World, as it turns out, was not an Eden. Like Europe, it was full of rival tribes, each made up of morally complex human beings who had been fighting each other, often quite viciously, since long before anyone crossed the Atlantic.

The movie from which Avatar seems to have drawn much of its inspiration – Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves – actually gets this. Costner’s film centers on his character’s realization that life among the Lakota, with their close-knit community and their respect for their ancestors and the land on which they live, is in some ways more meaningful than the army officer’s life that he is leaving behind. But Costner also doesn’t shrink from depicting the brutal realities of intertribal violence among the Plains Indians.

And this is where the worldbuilding of the Avatar movies falls flat. The Na’vi don’t have intertribal violence – or any of the other moral complexities of real-world primitive societies. There is only one kind of Na’vi – the good kind. The Na’vi never fight among themselves; they never fall short of their noble ideals; they never fail to live according to the value system of a particular 21^st century human culture. (A value system which, it is worth noting, is rarely lived up to by that culture itself.)

The only characters who really have agency are the human characters. People like Jake Sully can realize that their own tribe is in the wrong, and become protectors of the Na’vi. But the Na’vi have only one role: to suffer undeserved violence, to fight the good fight, and to be protected by Jake Sully. We do not see them having to make difficult decisions or undergo moral transformations of their own.

And yet in the real-life story of Europe’s conquering spree between the 15^th and 19^th centuries, the list of dramatis personae is a bit longer and more varied than the simple roster of noble savages, ignoble colonizers, and heroic defectors that one finds in a modern leftist morality play.

Almost everywhere the Europeans went, they found multiple tribes locked in complex and long-running conflicts with each other. And those tribes had to make hard decisions about how to relate to the newcomers – newcomers whose thirst for domination was often seen as useful rather than threatening.

Consider, for a moment, the situation of the Tlaxcaltecs, the fiercest warriors that Hernán Cortés encountered during his march to the Valley of Mexico.

While the precise nature of the Tlaxcaltec state is murky, historians generally agree that it was a republic. Decision-making power was vested in a deliberative body of some 50 to 200 elders, who governed about 300,000 people spread across four main towns and a number of surrounding villages. Tlaxcala – a mountainous region about 70 miles east of the Valley of Mexico – lacked palaces and ball-courts; this, among other evidence, has been cited by archaeologists to show that its inhabitants had a more egalitarian social structure than their main enemies, the Mexica, who were the dominant tribe in what is today known as the Aztec Empire.

Despite being so close to the Mexican capital, the Tlaxcaltecs had never been reduced to servitude. They were not among the hundreds of communities to whom Montezuma’s tribute-gatherers came each year to fill their quotas of gold and grain, featherwork and cotton cloth, timber and copper and fruits and fowls and boys and girls for slavery and sacrifice.

But Tlaxcala’s continued independence came at a price: from time to time the Tlaxcaltecs were compelled to meet the armies of the Mexica at pre-arranged times and places for the “flower wars” – ceremonial battles where the object was not to destroy the enemy, but to capture as many prisoners as possible, and to carry them back in triumph to the Valley of Mexico, where they would meet their end on the altars of Huitzilopochtli.

In September of 1519, ­Hernán Cortés entered Tlaxcala with about 600 men, 16 horses, and ten large guns. Cortés’s envoys had tried to open negotiations with the rulers of Tlaxcala, but to no avail. The Tlaxcaltecs, determined to guard their independence at all costs, were suspicious of all strangers – especially the newcomers whom some of their neighbors considered to be gods. On the first day of Cortés’s march through Tlaxcala, his company was caught in a skillfully laid ambush, where he lost a horse and several men.

Thousands more Tlaxcaltecs gathered for battle the next day, their spirits buoyed when they saw their countrymen parading the horse’s severed head in proof that the strange “deer” were not invulnerable. Again and again, Cortés’s force was assailed by a seemingly innumerable army under the command of Xicotencatl the Younger, and though the Spaniards won skirmish after skirmish, they saw with dismay that their foes, rather than scattering at the novel sound of cannon fire, always made orderly retreats, and quickly regrouped for the next assault.

The Spaniards found themselves fighting for their lives, day after day, on worse and worse ground, as the Tlaxcaltecs drove them into a network of ravines where their cavalry were useless. Meanwhile the Spanish priests remained awake night after night, hearing the terrified men’s confessions.

But as the warriors fought, the Tlaxcaltec senate debated whether or not a change of course was in order. Messengers brought them word that the newcomers were enemies of the Mexica. They heard how the Spaniards had angered Montezuma by encouraging the Totonacs – a coastal people who were among the empire’s most recent conquests – to imprison the Mexican tribute gatherers, and how the Totonacs had hailed Cortés’s men as liberators, turning out by the tens of thousands to provision his army, and to wrap garlands of flowers around the necks of his men and his horses.

A large faction of Tlaxcaltec elders began speaking in favor of an alliance with the Spaniards. Yet not all were convinced: they knew that the Spaniards were greedy and quick to violence, and that they desired to conquer the Mexica mainly because it was the Mexica who had the most gold, and who stood in the way of their own ambitions.

In the end, the Tlaxcaltecs decided on alliance. Two months later, a combined force of about 600 Spaniards and 20,000 Tlaxcaltecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico. The leaders of the Aztec Triple Alliance, hoping to avoid open warfare, admitted them into Mexico-Tenochtitlan as honoured guests. Yet in only a little time, the Spaniards had reneged on their promises of peace and made Montezuma a prisoner in his own palace, while they began ransacking the city for gold.

An uprising of the Mexica drove Cortés’ forces out of the capital on the night of 30 June, 1520 (the Spaniards called it La Noche Trista, “The Sad Night”), and the much-reduced army beat a ragtag retreat back to Tlaxcala. There, after making further promises not to exact tribute from the Tlaxcaltecs after the war was over, Cortés assembled an even larger army – this time of about 200,000 Tlaxcaltecs and other native allies, plus nearly a thousand Spanish reinforcements – and marched on Mexico again. On 13 August, 1521, after a difficult siege (for Mexico-Tenochtitlan was built on an island in the middle of a lake, and could only be reached by boats or long causeways), the capital fell, and Cortés began his rule as viceroy of “New Spain.”

After converting to the Christian faith, the Tlaxcaltecs became hidalgos in the new social hierarchy, and many of them settled all over modern-day Mexico, receiving land-grants from the Spanish crown. Yet over time, Spanish respect for their privileges dwindled, and like the other natives, the Tlaxcaltecs were treated in much the same way as medieval peasants. Even so, chattel slavery was rare under Spanish rule, and the most horrid aspect of Aztec hegemony – the ten to twenty thousand human sacrifices performed each year – was ended forever.

When the Tlaxcaltecs decided to ally with Hernán Cortés, they were not making a simple decision. They knew that the Spaniards were greedy, that they were capable of duplicity and needless violence, and that they intended to set up a system in which all of the natives ranked below themselves. Yet the Tlaxcaltec elders were also capable of practicing realpolitik – of making a hard-nosed assessment of the situation, deciding that it was in their interests to live under Spanish rather than Aztec overlordship, and acting accordingly.

Hardly anything in the history of the European settlement of the New World is as morally clear as Jake Sully arriving on Pandora, realizing that “greed-is-good” is no motto to live by, and rallying the Na’vi to defend their idyllic and harmonious society from the oppressive “sky people.”

Granted, there were plenty of Europeans whose effect on the indigenous cultures they encountered was wholly nasty. For instance, when slave-traders showed up on Africa’s Gold Coast and began offering liquor and muskets in exchange for slaves, they probably rationalized it by saying that they weren’t enslaving anyone who wasn’t already a slave under the laws of his or her own society. Yet when men with no local source of firearms suddenly encounter foreigners offering muskets in exchange for slaves, they really only have two options: to form raiding parties and make slaves out of their neighbors, or to become slaves themselves.

But one would be amiss not to include the end of the story, in which Europe, led by the British Empire, decisively turned against slavery in the early 19^th century, and stamped out the slave trade all across the globe, even in societies where it had flourished for thousands of years.

None of this complexity makes it into the Avatar version of history – a version which has been popular with leftists around the world for several lifetimes. (For instance, ever since Mexico gained its independence in 1821, many Mexican nationalists have called the Tlaxcaltecs traitors for siding with the Spaniards during the Conquest.)

And yet the ironic thing is that this version of history totally erases the experiences of a great many non-European peoples, who are either written out of the history books entirely, or else branded as turncoats, as if they had had no reasons for doing what they did.

I think that we deserve a version of history that does not treat Europeans (or their futuristic stand-ins) as the only people with agency, and that does not erase the diversity and moral complexity of other races.

For this reason, I would be very happy to see a big-budget, impeccably-researched epic film about the Conquest of Mexico, told from the Tlaxcaltec point of view, even to the point of as having most of the dialog in Nahuatl.

I do not expect to see such a movie made in my lifetime, as it would draw too small of an audience – there are those who don’t want to see pre-Christian America portrayed in a bad light, those who want their heroes to show a more sterling character than either Cortés or the Tlaxcaltecs actually did, and those who just don’t want to see the amount of nudity, cannibalism, and graphic violence that would be needed to tell the story properly. (Think Apocalypto, but with much larger armies).

Yet I have little doubt that, when the time comes, there will be no shortage of viewers for James Cameron’s Avatar 3.