The year was 2005. You lit an eyeliner pencil aflame with a stolen lighter and smeared the black gunk onto your eyelids. Fall Out Boy’s From Under the Cork Tree blasted from your stereo, much to your parents’ dismay. Tucked into your backpack (possibly also to your parents’ dismay) is the new hot, brooding teen vampire page-turner: a tome of biblical length and questionable prose, Twilight.
To hear Stephenie Meyer tell it, the originating seed of the book that would become a cultural juggernaut came to her by way of a dream in the summer of 2003. The central characters of 103-year-old vampire Edward and virginal teen human Bella sprung from her mind, demanding to be written. In search of a world to build around her sunlight-adverse characters, Google led her to one of the rainiest corners of the United States, the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state.
“I pulled up maps of the area and studied them, looking for something small, out of the way, surrounded by forest… And there, right where I wanted it to be, was a tiny town called ‘Forks’,” Meyer writes. “In researching Forks, I discovered the La Push Reservation, home to [the] Quileute Tribe. The Quileute story is fascinating, and a few fictional members of the tribe quickly became intrinsic to my story.”
In a bizarre, funhouse mirror of real-world imperialism, the Quileute tribe’s people and land provided a fruitful resource to Meyer; a cast of characters and backdrop ripe for mining. Unfortunately for everyone, Meyer did so while perpetuating harmful stereotypes about Native Americans to an audience of untold millions of young readers worldwide, accumulating wealth the Quileute would never share.
In 2003, when Meyer might have been researching this tribe, census reports tallied an official resident population of fewer than 400 people on the Quileute reservation at La Push. From this small but very real community, she plucked the third corner of the book’s love triangle, Jacob Black, along with a small group of Quileute people to serve as supporting characters. And so the stage was set: the genteel vampire Edward Cullen would stalk and court the innocent high schooler Bella Swan, and Black, a wolf shapeshifter, would be the loyal best friend. The dance between the three would provide fodder for Twilight and its sequels.
Within its pages, Meyer's fictional Quileute Tribe leans heavily on the storytelling tools of imperialism: in Twilight, Quileute are presented as impoverished, hot-headed and temperamental, while often servile to white characters at their own expense. In contrast, Edward Cullen and his family are immeasurably wealthy, highly educated white vampires who have evolved beyond the need to kill humans for survival. Soon after their first arrival to Washington, Cullen patriarch Carlisle brokered a peace treaty between the Quileute Nation and his vampire family. Ultimately, through the twists and folds of the winding plot, the treaty is broken by the Cullens, several young Quileutes become wolf shapeshifters, and subsequently guard and protect the family of vampires. Throughout the sequels, the wolf pack are derided by some of the vampires as dogs, and in human form, portrayed as barbaric, hypersexualized figures. Jacob, for example, even imprints on his future partner — a much-debated plot point that some say could be likened to grooming. These renderings can be viewed as part of a long history of depictions of real Native Americans as not fully human, as merely objects of the white imagination.
The exploitation is not only cultural, but material, too. Along with Twilight’s juggernaut sales success, the Quileute tribe’s fictionalized existence was also thrust into the public imagination. The problems presented themselves immediately. Meyer reportedly hadn’t gotten the tribe’s permission to use their tribal name, histories or cosmology for inspiration. To make matters worse, the tiny Quileute Nation, situated on little more than one square mile of La Push, Washington, was excluded from the books’ exponentially growing commercial empire. (A representative from Quileute Nation declined to comment for this story. Teen Vogue reached out to Meyer’s publisher for comment but has not yet heard back.)
This is nothing to say of the even more monumental fortune amassed by the film series; rights to content featuring the Quileute wolfpack of the films apparently belong to Meyer and Summit Entertainment. Twilight’s era in Hollywood is just one chapter in a lengthy history of destructive portrayals of Native American people in cinema. Since the era of silent film, Hollywood has trafficked images and stories about Native Americans for non-Native audiences—to deleterious effects.
In reality, the Quileute people are an open nation, welcoming tourists and visitors curious about their culture— the true Quileute creation story, in which the original tribal members were transformed into humans from wolves (not humans into vampire-fighting werewolves).
