The Twilight Saga, beginning with the publication of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight in 2005, was undeniably a cultural phenomenon. The books sold over 160 million copies worldwide and sparked a billion-dollar film franchise. Twilight fans swooned over sparkling vampires and shirtless werewolves. Teenage girls wore t-shirts declaring themselves “Team Edward” or “Team Jacob.” However, the Twilight franchise is not above criticism, especially for its impact on the Quileute tribe in Washington and its treatment of Jacob Black as a Quileute and Native American character.

The Quileute are a Native American tribe who live in La Push, Washington, along the Pacific coast and very near Forks, the rainy town in which Twilight takes place. Jacob, the wolfish third in Twilight’s famous love triangle, is written to be Quileute. He lives on the reservation and is a student at the Quileute Tribal School. His father Billy is a member of the Tribal Council. But Stephanie Meyer, Twilight’s white author, treats the Quileute people and Quileute culture more like a plot device to drive her vampire romance than a real group of people who deserve respectful representation.

Throughout the Twilight books, Meyer appropriates and completely misrepresents Quileute culture to advance her story. In book 1, Jacob’s entire role as a character is to tell Bella Swan, Twilight’s white teenage heroine, a completely made-up “Quileute” story about the “cold ones,” thus allowing Bella to discover that her brooding love interest is actually a 100-year-old vampire. From the second book on, Jacob and the Quileute people play a much bigger role in the story, with Jacob as Edward’s romantic rival and he and his friends as a pack of shapeshifting teenage werewolves. Jacob’s father tells vampire stories around a campfire, and this would appear to be the extent of his Tribal Council duties. Meyer almost exclusively writes Quileute women in submissive roles, taking care of the boys in their lives. In the movies, Billy and all of the werewolves are played by indigenous actors, but none of the actors are Quileute. 

The real-life Quileute people do have an origin story involving a transformation from wolves, but Meyer doesn’t treat this story with the respect that it deserves, and the association with wolves is where the similarities between Twilight and real Quileute stories end. Quileute stories feature trickster figures like Raven—there are no werewolves, no vampiric “cold ones,” and definitely no imprinting. The Tribal Council governs the Quileute nation and is made up of elected officials—often including women in positions of power, and not just widows standing in for their husbands like Meyer implies. The Quileute people have a language that their tribal school still teaches. They have traditions like dancing, drumming, carving, fishing, making baskets and traditional clothing from cedar bark, and participating in an annual Paddle to visit and eat with other coastal tribes, many of which date back centuries. But in Twilight, real Quileute culture is disrespected, rewritten and often waved away completely.

In her writing of the Quileute tribe, Meyer also falls back on some incredibly harmful stereotypes about Native Americans. The werewolf boys are sexualized and treated as “exotic,” with an uncomfortable amount of attention paid to what Meyer refers to as their “russet skin.” Jacob and his Quileute friends spend most of their time shirtless and literally steaming hot. Meyer also writes the Quileute boys as rowdy and uneducated—Jacob mentions his school in the first book, but never actually seems to attend class, instead always free to spend time with Bella. And, through the werewolf transformations, Meyer portrays indigenous, Quileute characters as inherently more violent and animalistic. In Twilight, only a member of the Quileute tribe can be a werewolf, and when the wolf boys shapeshift, it’s often an explosion of anger that can seriously hurt the people around them.

There are a lot of problems that come from fictionalizing real groups of people. Representation in film and popular fiction can completely change how racial minorities are perceived, and the Twilight Saga has impacted how the general public sees the Quileute nation. Meyer wrote negative stereotypes into her Native characters, rewrote Quileute history, and spread misinformation about the Quileute tribe. To Twilight fans, “Quileute” means “werewolf” instead of a group of real people with a rich cultural history. Moreover, Stephanie Meyer, using the Quileute tribe as a convenient place to shove her lore and find a sexy romantic rival for her white vampires, made millions of dollars from the Twilight Saga. The Twilight films likewise brought in billions of dollars for Summit Entertainment. The Quileute tribe was used to make this huge profit, but they didn’t receive any of the money the Twilight series earned.

Like a whole lot of other teenage girls, I read Twilight when I was in middle school. In college, I watched the Twilight movies with my friends and giggled about how terrible they were. If you’re anything like me, you may have once enjoyed the books—or enjoyed making fun of the movies—too. So how can we give back to the Quileute tribe, all these years later? 

For one thing, we can listen to Native voices and educate ourselves on the real history, stories, and culture of the Quileute nation. You can follow the Quileute tribe on Instagram and Facebook, or read the Quileute newsletter. Read up on how the truth differs from Twilight—the Burke Museum worked with the Quileute tribe and made a whole website dedicated to it. If you ever find yourself on Quileute land, make sure to respect Tribal Country etiquette. And, if you can, give a donation to Quileute Move to Higher Ground—because they’re so close to the Pacific Ocean, the Quileute people live in a tsunami zone, and they need the funds to move their community to safety. 

Twilight has gotten a lot of love in the past 20 years. Let’s show the Quileute nation a little love too.