Avatar, Tar Sands, and Dad

This is an (auto)ethnographic performance inspired by a conversation with my father while leaving the theater after watching Avatar back in 2009. It is intended to be performed as readers’ theater. In it, I examine the role anthropology plays in the performance of imperialist nostalgia across the stories of James Cameron’s film Avatar , Ursula K. Le Guin’s novella The Word for World Is Forest , and Theodora Kroeber’s Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America . I see a performance of alternative possibilities in Le Guin’s utopian speculative fiction and in recent Indigenous-led activism opposing megaresource extraction projects such as Alberta’s tar sands and the pipelines that snake out from it.