Dehumanization of Natives

Twilight Saga: New Moon

The movie is based off Stephanie Meyer's novel, New Moon which was made in 2006. We see a human female who is called Bella and her boyfriend, Edward, who is a never-aging vampire. Another important character we see is Jacob Black, a Quileute, who helps Bella in a variety of ways after Edward breaks-up with her. Jacob has the ability to transform into a wolf when he wants to, along with his tribal friends. Both Jacob and his tribe are portrayed as indigenous people throughout this movie, which is a very important concept to grasp in order to understand what I'm trying to say. Throughout the movie they do many things that stereotype as well as dehumanize Native Americans. On this page, I will be going into more detail on how Meyer failed to showcase Native Americans positively instead of negatively.

Native Stereotypes

This clip from the movie represented Meyer's view on Native Americans in many ways. To begin, Jacobs friends, who are also indigenous like him, come out from a forest without much clothing. This applies to the commonly understood stereotype of Native Americans being closely related with nature and its surroundings. Adding onto the minimized clothing, in our everyday society we see someone without clothes as a savage. Another stereotype we saw was how anger triggered violence, which also shows how natives were animalized. I will go into more detail further down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOnWEmbW3OQ

From clip on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOnWEmbW3OQ

The Body

Jacob's friends, who I mentioned earlier where also indigenous like him, appear to have a very muscular build on their bodies. In our modern day society we usually portray someone who is always in nature as a beast or savage with a very strong body, ultimately dehumanizing them into an animal. We also dehumanize Native Americans for living with nature, which connects to the movie's way of dehumanizing indigenous people.

Human to Non-Human

As we now by now, Jacob and his friends are all indigenous folk. The fact that they have the ability to immediately turn into an animal shows the dehumanization of Native Americans. When one of Jacob's friend got mad at Bella, he immediately resorted to violence and dehumanized himself by turning into a wolf. This further proves the stereotype of natives being non-human as the movie shows how the anger couldn't be controlled. When Jacob and his friend both turn into a wolf, they are no longer human but instead savage beasts. I believe Myer was trying to prove that Natives Americans were strong and resilient, but she did so in a way that instead backfired on her.

https://gifs.com/gif/transformation-jacob-to-wolf-the-twilight-saga-new-moon-hd-v1OYrG

Metamorphosis

I believe this movie related very closely to the book know as Metamorphosis, which I read in the last quarter of humanities core. In the book, many people were turned into things other than humans such as trees or even animals. Their transformation dehumanized them, leading to them to be savage-like. In New Moon, we see this same type of dehumanization happening where a human turns into a animal and loses all human characteristics. However, a key difference to understand is that in Metamorphoses, change was not voluntarily and instead caused by others with power. In New Moon, the change from human to animal was purely by choice.

Final Reflection

In all honesty, I would like to learn more about this topic of the dehumanization of humans. I could see a possibility of pursuing this topic for my research next year, but it is too early to tell just yet. Using a website to portray my ideas, instead of a boring old essay, helped me express my creativity better. I usually tend to get easily overwhelmed with so many ideas in my head that I cannot even write any of it down. The website allowed me to express my ideas through images and videos. I developed a better persuasive as I am able to better convey my message/argument to the reader now. I struggle writing essays as they constraint me, but with a website I can go all-out and do whatever I want to, which is exactly what I did. My method of splitting the text up, I believe, helps the reader understand my message better without having to re-read. Overall though, I cannot wait to see where I will be next quarter.

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