Team Quileute

Seattle Art Museum helps fans of Jacob and Edward discover the local legends at the heart of the summer’s biggest blockbuster.

Quileute dancer Tyler Hobucket wears a wolf headdress/mask and blanket on the reservation, circa 1955. J. W. Thompson, courtesy of Museum of History & Industry.

In 2003, a Mormon housewife living in Arizona decided to write a love story, but she had a problem. Her vampire hero needed to be able to court the story’s teenage heroine during school hours. Looking for a place where clouds might obscure the sun during daylight hours, she logged on to her computer and googled “rainiest place in America.” Seconds later, she discovered Forks, Washington, and the location for Twilight was set.

To the surprise of the author, Stephenie Meyer, her young-adult fiction saga was quickly picked up by publishing house Little, Brown, becoming a best seller and inspiring a series of enormously popular film adaptations, the first sequel of which would break the worldwide record for highest opening-day earnings ever. 

In turn, the communities on the western shores of the Olympic peninsula have seen a dramatic rise in visitors as thousands of fans have flocked to the Forks high school and the La Push beaches to experience firsthand the settings of the book (the movies are filmed in Vancouver and Oregon). One of those communities is the home of the Quileute, a Native American tribe that was completely unprepared for the limelight into which its culture was thrust – and for the strange, unfamiliar costume it would be wearing.

Subsequent Google searches Meyer performed during her light research for the books returned oral legends of the Quileute, one of which says that the first tribal members were changed from wolves to humans by the Transformer, Kwati. Of course, descending from wolves is not the same as being werewolves, which are European in origin and have made great literary enemies of vampires for years. But the legend was too tempting and convenient for Meyer to resist. 

“Bella [the heroine] needed a way to find out the truth about Edward [the vampire hero],” Meyer writes on her Web site, “and the conveniently located Quileute tribe, with all their fantastic legends, provided a cool option for that revelation. And so Jacob was born.” She added an entire pack of werewolves to the story, in fact, led by Jacob Black, a fiery Native American teenager who transforms Edward and Bella’s near-sighted infatuation into a steamy love triangle.

Historically, Hollywood hasn’t been too sensitive or equitable in its portrayal of Native Americans, often characterizing them as subservient sidekicks or savage enemies of white men: in Twilight they appear as both. The Native American characters in Twilight (both the books and the films) are portrayed as living on a rustic reservation, and they rarely appear in anything more than denim cut-offs and their “russet-skinned” glory, as Meyer puts it in the novels. As werewolves, they are aggressive and unable to control themselves as they learn to master their primitive lupine nature. And any action they take positions them as dutiful protectors of the white humans or vicious combatants of the white vampires.

Barbara Brotherton, curator of Native American Art at Seattle Art Museum, is perplexed that Meyer, despite completely fictionalizing the tribe’s lifestyle and legends, used the real name of the Quileute. While Meyer didn’t do anything illegal, it’s ethically dubious at best to fictionalize a group of actual people. “They could have created a wonderful cultural story there, but they didn’t. The Quileute piece of this is still largely in the shadows.” 

If you’re looking for authentic material evidence of Quileute culture in the movies, you’ll be hard-pressed to find much more than a drum or dream catcher. Some people who had never heard of the Quileute prior to the Twilight spotlight now believe that this Native population’s legend actually predicted that they would turn into werewolves. In the twenty-first century, the public face of a Native tribe for a long time will be defined internationally by an oversimplified and insulting Hollywood interpretation. 

Still, despite the onslaught of fans and media and their repeated trespasses (most notably MSN’s unauthorized filming of sacred burial sites earlier this year), the Quileute have responded with openness. They have adopted a firm media policy and a set of Indian Country guidelines but also offer a Twilight vacation package at the community’s resort.

The tribe’s willingness to play along is a matter of cultural survival for a community that has seen its share of loss. Previously occupying a territory that stretched across a vast distance of the Pacific coast, the Quileute reservation occupies approximately one square mile near the town of La Push. In 1889, the Quileute lost a great many of their artworks and artifacts to arson. And only two speakers of the tribe’s native language remain. What wasn’t lost in the fire has frequently been mistaken for works by neighboring tribes, such as Quinault and Makah.

A little over a year ago, a publicist, a filmmaker, a photographer and a fundraiser, all members of Native American tribes, drove with Brotherton four hours west of Seattle to meet with the Quileute to help them regain what has been lost. “We met with the tribal council and we just said, ‘You know we have these resources available; would you like to use them in some way?’ And they said yes.”

The result of that meeting, Behind the Scenes: The Real Story of the Quileute Wolves, will be on display at SAM starting this month. Created in close collaboration with a Quileute advisory committee, the exhibit brings together thirty artifacts that reference the traditional wolf mythology of the Quileute and sheds a clearer light on this formerly isolated tribe. 

“When you walk into Quileute houses, they have baskets, they have artwork, they have things that are very much related to their culture,” Brotherton says. Now, both because of Twilight and in spite of it, that culture will be brought out into the open. •

Behind the Scenes: The Real Story of the Quileute Wolves opens at Seattle Art Museum on August 14.