ABSTRACT
When John Cameron's 2009 film, Avatar, came out in Bolivia, the president, Evo Morales, immediately declared it one of his favorite films. In Bolivia, however, it is also the national government that presents itself as indigenous as it lobbies for climate change and resource management. By the end of 2011, however, Evo Morales appears as the hostile power in a conflict with indigenous people in lowland Bolivia. As the cartoon fromLa Prensa suggests, the Na'vi are identified with the residents of TIPNIS, the Territorio Indigena Parque Nacional Isidoro Secure. Nicole Fabricant's work with landless peasants in the eastern lowlands offers a comparable analysis of mobilized groups who use land as an indigenous trope of political engagement. The globalized concept explicitly presents indigenous people as being subjects of colonization, and many scholars have argued for a productive engagement with concepts of indigeneity precisely because it is a means through which relatively powerless people can make justice claims.
