Shyamalan film puts white actors in Asian and Inuit roles

Gwen Florio

writes the Native American

news blog, BuffaloPost.net

M. Night Shyamalan's sixth sense seems to have failed him. Because when it came to casting for his most recent movie, The Last Airbender, due in theaters Thursday, he saw white people.

Just one problem. The characters in the Nickelodeon anime series on which Airbender is based are, you know, not.

Much rightly has been made over the fact that even though the original series mostly features Asian themes, the lead roles in the movie went to three white actors and an Indian, Dev Patel. Who plays the bad guy.

Contrast that with the Twilight teen vampire series, which generally gets high marks for casting Native American actors in the roles of Quileute Nation members. Interestingly, the release date for Airbender has been moved up to the day after Twilight: Eclipse, the most recent in the series, comes out.

The website Racebending.com airs its outrage over the situation, and it urges a boycott of the movie. But Racebending's focus - like that of most of the accounts of the controversy surrounding the casting of Airbender - has to do with the Asian-white divide.

Hello? What about the Inuit? As in, the Folks Formerly Known as Eskimo. As in, two of the four main characters in Airbender, Katara and Sokka - who will be played in the movie by the decidedly non-aboriginal Nicola Peltz and Jackson Rathbone.

Racebending's extensive website has only the most cursory references to Katara and Sokka being drawn from Inuit culture. Let's just take a moment to appreciate the insult-to-injury fact that a protest of tone-deaf miscasting nearly completely ignores an entire facet of that miscasting.

And then let's turn to Neil Diamond, who might reasonably wonder why we're so surprised.

Diamond - who's probably even more sick of "Sweet Caroline" jokes than he is of Native Americans' being played by Caucasians - is a Cree filmmaker whose documentary Reel Injun was released this year.

The movie takes a look at Hollywood's from-the-start stumbles when it comes to native people, from white guys miscast as American Indians (Think Boris Karloff is a stretch in beads and feathers? Try William Shatner) to Indians miscast as, well, Indians - but not the right kind.

"I had to learn Lakota," actor Graham Greene, who is Oneida, reminisces about his role in Dances With Wolves. "I can't even speak my own language."