Here

The film is linked there on a site that might work better. It even has an MP4 download option.

But I think I picked up enough from the splash page and Frank’s comments to guess what it was all about. Please keep that in mind if I make any obvious blunders in my comments below.

The damage resulting from genocide (or slavery) does not stop when the evil is finally outlawed. A broken culture cannot easily repair itself, and new victims, and villains, continue to emerge long after the initial injustice is gone.

The Oglala were a proud nation, and a powerful and adaptable one. In little over a century, they, and the other Plains peoples, developed a sophisticated and complex culture based on an entirely new technology: the horse. They mastered how to ride, train and breed the mounts they captured from the Spanish, and cleverly applied them to solve the immense problem of survival on the Great Plains. The culture based on the horse and bison that resulted was not only a successful human response to life in a very difficult environment, but I am convinced it was itself on the verge of an explosive renaissance. With the trade goods available from the East, textiles, firearms, metalworking, there is no telling what these people could have accomplished.

Much the same happened in Mexico and Peru, where great civilizations and complex, sophisticated cultures with their own technology, science, art, philosphy and government were reduced to shuffling peasantry in a generation by a few barbarians armed with gunpowder, iron weapons and smallpox.

Today, the white man looks at the reservations (and the ghettoes) and wonders how all that crime, violence, poverty, addiction and despair can exist in one place and time. Surely, those people must be an inferior race, all they have to do is pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make something of themselves, like we did. Why don’t they just get a job. Those people have no family values, no sense of decency, no work ethic. They have no one to blame but themselves.

In other words, they have no culture. They lost their culture. Or it was taken away from them, whether by deliberate action, or from the inevitable clash of different ways of living and looking at the world–it makes no difference. That is the definition of genocide, not the extermination of a population, but the systematic dismantling of a culture. The Sioux nation, and all the others, did not succumb to repeating rifles and the railroad, or even the plow; they were conquered by the white man’s insistence that he knew how to use the land better than those who already lived on it, so he was entitled to take it.

We today can not blame ourselves for what our ancestors did to the red man, or the black. Neither can the shattered remnants of those communities use the injustices inflicted on them as an excuse for their individual failures to correct and transcend them. But we, and they, still share some responsibility for what happened then and what must be done now. And we do owe them a little understanding, and a recognition of the history that led to our present. We need to at least show them a little respect for what we did to them.

We can’t undo it. All we can do is remember it and try to be better in the future for having committed the atrocities in the past.

For the last 50,000 or so years of our evolution, there was no word for genocide and crimes against humanity was a concept that we didn’t grasp. In the last hundred years we have at least learned to question ourselves and try to make amends to some extent. The only thing that we can do that matters is to not do it again.

Films like Avatar like to imply that we have learned nothing and we will make the same mistakes in the future. I think they are wrong. There will always be individuals, even groups of individuals, willing to repeat the mistakes but I believe that humanity as a whole is good.