Arctic and Asian Indigeneities, Asian/North American Settler/Colonialism: Animating Intimacies and Counter-Intimacies in Avatar: The Last Airbender

Identifying the competing interpretations of geographical spatiality and historicities that inform racial and decolonial identities depends upon an act of interpretation that decenters the vertical interactions of colonizer and colonized and recenters the horizontal struggles among peoples with competing claims to historical oppressions. These vertical interactions continually foreground the arrival of Europeans as the defining event within settler societies, consistently place horizontal histories of oppressions into zero-sum struggles for hegemony, and distract from the complicities of colonialism and the possibilities for anticolonial action that emerge outside and beyond the Manichean allegories that define oppression. —Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire "Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Only the Avatar, master of all four elements, could stop them, but when the world needed him most, he vanished. A hundred years passed and my brother and I discovered the new Avatar, an Airbender named Aang. And although his airbending skills are great, he has a lot to learn before he's ready to save anyone. But I believe that Aang can save the world." —Opening sequence of Avatar: The Last Airbender In 2007 the United Nations General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Although most governments in Asia voted for the declaration, they questioned, if not denied, the possibility of Indigenous peoples within their territories. As Long Xuequn argued on behalf of the Chinese delegation to the 1997 United Nations Commission on Human Rights, The indigenous issues are a product of special historical circumstances. By and large, they are the result of the colonialist policy carried out in modern history by European countries in other regions of the world, especially on the continents of America and Oceania. … In China there are no indigenous people and therefore no indigenous issues.¹ Nonetheless, peoples in Asia and elsewhere mobilize via self-identification as Indigenous because Indigeneity's inherent claim to sovereignty empowers demands for cultural and political self-determination, catalyzing local struggles into transnational networks of solidarity.² Denials of historical and present-day Asian (neo)colonialism and imperialism by nations like China and Japan therefore resonate with disavowals by the Asian diasporas of any role in the service of the settler colonial...