Native Werewolves

I've been noticing a troubling pattern in the otherwise cotton-candy books I've been reading and campy movies I've been viewing. I guess my sensitivity comes from my academic work, reading and teaching about the Other in American culture, specifically how certain groups are disenfranchised by the white hegemony and treated as animals.

I've noticed that an awful lot of werewolves in recent supernatural books and movies are Native American as humans.

In the giggly Twilight books, Jacob and his community are a group of Quileute Indians, who turn into werewolves who protect the community from vampires. Jacob's last name is Black. Black? Stephanie Meyer can never be accused of being a literary heavyweight, but didn't she realize the double Othering of her characterization? Meyer includes one female in this "pack"--a bitter, scorned, more than likely infertile woman named Leah (named for the wife of Jacob in Genesis?). The vampires like to kill the werewolves--a likely dynamic since the white guys live forever, while the red/black guys die naked and with bravery, sacrificing their noble-savage lives for the good of all humankind and diminishing their already low population.

In the Sookie Stackhouse books, which provide about half of the plot of HBO's True Blood, the werewolves are more well-rounded, but still the racist stereotypes abound. Alcide Herveaux, who hasn't yet shifted into the HBO landscape, is a rich kid who is part of the supposedly noble group of werewolves (abbreviated as "were" most of the time, suggesting their already past-tense existence, perhaps). He, of course, hates the vampires but tolerates them in the name of civility. Unlike the vampires who are publicly known, or "out of the coffin," the were have not come out of the woods yet. Alcide's pack includes females, who are more vicious and bloodthirsty than the males, suggesting that when women turn into wolves, we are even more animalistic--a double Othering. The were have as much to fear within their own "shifter" population than from outside predators, and some of the most violent scenes in Charlaine Harris's series depict one-on-one fights to gain leadership of the pack--episodes that are as ruthless as the stories of Michael Vick's torture of pit bulls. It may as well be saying that external forces don't really have to worry about saving white hegemony from being overtaken or killed by wolves or Native Americans; they will eventually decimate themselves. Finally, I'm not a French speaker, but when I looked up the translation of Herveaux, I was saddened to see the closest English word: calves. They're not only wolves, but they are also cattle, and not even full-grown cows.

Another less famous example of the sanctioned racism of the Native American as animal is in the really bad movie Skinwalkers, which happened to be on cable last weekend while I was grading papers. The two packs/tribes in the movie war against each other, intent on annihilation. The "good" group doesn't "feed" on humans, and they keep their shape-shifting secret even from the people closest to them. The women in the "bad" group are more violent than the men, and what's more, they reinforce misogynist stereotypes by manipulating men through their sexuality or their feigned vulnerability. Vagina dentatis, indeed. Both packs seek control of the son of a white woman and one of the "bad" tribe's men because the boy can somehow determine the entire future existence of the Indian-wolves, creating a living, breathing Manichean dialectic in this mixed-race child. His blood, if injected into a werewolf, can magically and permanently restore the humanity of the creature, as if racial identity is in the blood--a throwback to the physiognomists and phrenologists.

Granted, I am aware of the Native American concept of the spirit animal or the shaman-skinwalker who draped himself in a wolf's coat to perform certain rituals. However, as far as I know, none of the Native American myths of lycanthropy involve violence toward humans and especially not cannibalism.

It's no wonder that vampires and werewolves are all the rage again, and the twenty-first century has added a level of appeal by putting an ethical spin into their supernatural personalities. The Twilight Quileutes will always save the girl from her perils, the were will always be Sookie Stackhouse's hairy saviors, and the Skinwalker-types will work for humanity by eradicating the wolfen blood from one Indian at a time until each one can fully assimilate into white culture.

These twenty-first-century depictions of werewolves indeed project a romanticized view of the disappearing Native American, but in any romanticism of an entire population is a thick foundation of racism that the Twilighters and fans of blood-sucking, shapeshifting creatures will internalize. Vampires are still human in their undeadly presence, but the Native Americans who shift into wolves lose all humanity, including the power to speak. They are the subaltern of the supernatural world, and even when they are human, they are not allowed to speak of their primal nature. The recent depictions of werewolves serve as yet another example of removing the agency from the Native Americans.