We Can Do This, Together: Community and Change in the Water Tribes (1 of 2)

[ljwrites]

Culture in Avatar: The Last Airbender Series:

1. What It Is to Be Free: Aang and the Spirituality of the Air Nomads

2. We Can Do This, Together: Community and Change in the Water Tribes

3. Stand Strong, Stand Proud: Earth Kingdom Resilience and Identity

4. Burn for My Belief: The Fire Nation and the Courage of Conviction
5. Subcultures and Conclusion

The Water Tribes come across as a people of contrasts. On the one hand they seem to be the great communitarians, valuing their communal ties and the bonds of family and friendship. On the other hand we have seen how oppressive that community can be in the Northern Water Tribe arc at the end of Book 1, when teenage girls were forced into arranged marriages and the role of women was strictly proscribed. How do we explain this seeming contradiction?

You can see the dissonance in the most prominent Water Tribe characters, too. Katara and Sokka are both warm and fiercely loyal characters who chased after a Fire Nation warship to save a boy who was basically a stranger at the time. Since then they formed the heart of the ragtag group that helped the Avatar save the world. Yet Sokka was initially portrayed as a pompous stuffed shirt, and even later his control freak tendencies were very much in evidence. The same is true of Katara, who actually came to blows with Toph (who will of course feature prominently in the Earth Kingdom essay) over the issue of control.

My argument, much as with the Air Nomad culture essay before, is that there is no real contradiction. The communal and personal restrictions that the Water Tribes and their members display are simply the shadow, as Carl Jung may put it, of their strong belief in community. Obviously there is no community, large or small, without order and rules. Of course, order can become so rigid that it comes into tension with the very community it was meant to support, as members of the community feel excluded and oppressed. It also comes into conflict with the other major Water Tribe cultural value, that of flexibility--which not only means a better fish hook, but also new rules of community to adapt to changing times. This tension and harmony between community and adaptability, stability and dynamism, drive Water Tribe culture and the story of Avatar.

We Can Do This if We Work Together: The Soul of the Water Tribes

"Water is the element of change. The people of the Water Tribes are capable of adapting to many things. They have a sense of community and love that holds them together through anything."
- Iroh, 3.09 Bitter Work

To pick up from Iroh's quote, two constant themes define the character of the Water Tribes' culture: Adaptability and community. The need for adaptability is inherent in Water Tribe life. The two Tribes live in the North and South Poles of the Avatar world, which are perhaps the major lowland regions of the world least hospitable to life except the Xiwang desert in the Earth Kingdom territories. Much like the Inuits who partly inspired the Water Tribes benefited from technology such as dogs and boats, living in such harsh conditions must have required resourcefulness and innovation.

Community is vital to any culture, but a strong sense of community is especially central for the Water Tribes for several reasons.Cooperation and division of labor have obvious survival benefits, especially in a hunter-gatherer society where nutrition, energy, and time are at a premium. Hunting and fishing, major sources of nutrition and materials, were probably also cooperative in nature, especially for big game hunting and long-term fishing expeditions, and whaling. In a close-knit community members could share information and innovation, allowing them to improve and adapt more quickly. And when it came down to it, if the provider of a family was unavailable or dead, the extended community was the ultimate insurance to provide care for the family members left behind. We see this in action in the South Pole village where the series begins, with communal child care and no doubt the pooling of most goods and services. Is it any wonder that a people that had to rely on each other in demanding surroundings developed such a close community ethic?


Their community? Totally adorable.

These central values of adaptability and community provide a perspective to the stories of both the Water Tribes and their most prominent characters including Katara, Sokka, Yue, Hakkoda, Hama, and though more in the background than the younger set, Pakku and Kanna. First I will discuss how the Water Tribe cultural values helped shape the story of Avatar. Next comes the darker side of community--that of control and oppression. Finally I will examine how the Water Tribes, the Northern in particular, rethink their norms to reflect changing times, healing old rifts and exclusions to create an even stronger community than before.

Now Your Destinies Are Intertwined: Water Tribe Values and the Story of Avatar

The very start of Katara and Sokka's journey in "The Avatar Returns" implicates a sense of common destiny and identifying as part of a greater whole. Katara's insistence that they go save Aang from the Fire Nation might not be surprising, given the rapport she'd already built up with him. The true surprise is Sokka, who earlier ordered Aang out of the village for the stunt with the warship. While Katara was making a speech about rescuing Aang Sokka was making preparations for departure, taking it for granted that he and Katara were going to chase down a warship from the most militarily advanced nation in the world.

So what changed between the time Sokka kicked Aang out of the village for endangering it, and the time he was packing up the canoe to rescue the kid? Obviously the formerly frozen boy had given himself up to the Fire Nation to save their village, and turned out to be the last hope for saving the world. But what did these changes mean in terms of the characters' choices?

To examine that, it would be instructive to go back to the earlier scene when Sokka asked Aang to leave the village, with Gran-Gran backing him up. An angry Katara announced she would follow Aang, but faltered when Sokka demanded whether Katara would choose Aang over tribe and family. Seeing her hesitation, Aang counsels her to stay and Katara doesn't argue, painful as the separation is, and the loss of her one chance to be a real waterbender. Despite her friendship with Aang and her desire to train, the ties of tribe and family were still stronger than her ties to Aang, who was in the end an outsider.

What changed between then and the beginning of the journey, then, was that Aang became a part of their community. Not only did he sacrifice himself for the tribe, but he is also the Avatar--their best hope for ending this long war and saving the war-torn Water Tribes, not to mention the world. He both became an honorary member of their tribe and connected them to the larger world, and so became someone that not only Katara but Sokka could risk their lives for without a second thought. Kanna put it succinctly when she said their destinies were intertwined, which is the essence of being part of each other--that we are in it together, and nothing can happen to you without it affecting me.


Off screen she also pinched their cheeks and spit-shined their hair.

We see Katara and Sokka making the same choice again in "Bato of the Water Tribe," when they choose to continue with Aang to the North Pole over seeing their father for the first time in two years. Sure, they were angry with Aang over his deception when he revealed he had hidden their father's letter, but in the end they reaffirm their bond, with Sokka stating that Aang is their family, too. It's a bond that would carry them from the end of the journey, and expand to encompass allies from the Earth Kingdom and even the Fire Nation, until it led to the beginning of healing for the entire world.

The importance of togetherness and the greater whole are evident in the actions of other Water Tribe characters, too. It's fitting that their warriors use wolf symbolism, for instance in the "wolf tail" fashion of wearing hair, or the wolf helmet. As pointed out in "Bato of the Water Tribe," the wolf is a pack animal whose strength springs from oneness with the pack--and whose weakness is in separation. And who can forget the way Katara kept her friends together and alive in their deprivation and despair through "The Desert?" Princess Yue was resigned to sacrificing her personal happiness for her tribe in the Northern Water Tribe episodes, and ultimately gave her life for them. Time and time again we see the Water Tribe characters make choices on the basis of group loyalty and a sincere conviction in the value of the greater whole, whether it is their family, tribe, friends, or the world.

This deep sense of community is evident even when it is twisted by tragedy. While the messed-up-ness of Hama in "The Puppetmaster" is obvious, at least part of her madness and hatred may have been from enforced separation from her tribe and traditions. To return to wolf analogy, these animals have been known to become neurotic when held captive separate from their pack, which is exactly what happened to Hama. Her waterbending was her sole connection to her people and past, but it was also the part of herself she could never show to the light. So it went underground instead (literally), and became a force for her perceived enemies' suffering and fear. Also, the full moon when Hama used her bloodbending is not only a peak time for waterbending powers but also entwined with the Water Tribes' history and way of life.

Even the way Hama forced bloodbending on Katara can be read as a distorted expression of communal values, because there is no continuity and thus no community without passing experience and skills to the younger generation. I believe Hama, by using her one tangible connection to her tribe to harm members of the group that hurt her and her tribe so badly, then teaching that knowledge to a younger member of the tribe, was acting out--in her own sad way--a desperate need to reconnect to the community she was cut off from. And need I even go into how ingenious it was to adapt waterbending to control a living body, if we leave aside how wrong it was? It is ironic how even a perversion of cultural values can throw them into sharp relief.


Poster girl for culture, that's her.

I haven't said a lot about adaptability compared to community, though I will have more to say about it in the context of adapting community and its rules to new situations. As with community, adaptability isn't a value unique to the Water Tribes; it's mostly a matter of emphasis and perceptive frames. Nevertheless, we see a great deal of resourcefulness and flexibility in the Water Tribes, particularly in the case of Sokka and his father Hakkoda, both leaders in their own right. Master Piandao comments on Sokka's flexible way of thinking in "Sokka's Master," and this creativity is on full display in episodes such as "Day of Black Sun" and "The Boiling Rock." Sokka and his father's... unorthodox... sense of humor may also be an indication of their creativity, since humor is nothing if not the art of the unexpected.

So community and adaptation are great and all. But how does that explain the blatant and outdated sexism in the Northern Water Tribe? What is the meaning of adaptation if they can't adapt their own rules to changing times, and what is the value of a community that excludes and oppresses its members? Next, in Part 2 of this essay I will discuss this contradiction, how it might have came about and how the characters worked on these issues in the show.