I've written before how Avatar isn't quite as much like Dances With Wolves as one might think. The similarities seem more superficial when one considers the similarities of DWW with other modern film stories.
However, this is not to argue that DWW has not had its influences on other related plots such as Avatar. But it may help to compare DWW with a story that may have less superficial similarities but possibly some similarites that run more deep.
The film The Last Samurai is a somewhat more recent film. Like DWW, TLS depicts a man who is haunted by the horrors of war and in need of a return to nature away from the industrialized modernity that senselessly mows down the closer-to-nature natives for political purposes. He starts out with very different loyalties and slowly comes to realize that the ways of the natives are more healthy, natural, and honorable, and will end up siding with the natives' violent confrontation with the people he was once loyal to.
In some ways, TLS is even more like Avatar than DWW is in that the former warrior actually becomes leader in the violent confrontation with his former people. However, TLS and DWW are even more about a cultural transformation than a spiritual or physical transformation. Avatar certainly takes some of these elements, but these other stories are less about greed than about cultural ignorance and a distorted sense of modernity resulting in politicized prejudices. In these senses one might detect closer sympathies with Pocahontas (which drew more directly from DWW than the later Pocahontas-inspired Avatar)
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