Is Taylor Lautner Native American? The ethnicity of the Twilight actor explained

yet TwilightSome fans accepted that Taylor Lautner Has Native American descent considered his character’s ethnicity. Taylor Lautner rode the massive pop culture wave that was the Twilight franchise that began in 2005 with the first novels by Stephenie Meyer. It didn’t take long for a movie adaptation to come around, considering Harry Potter was in the middle of his run of fantasy book-to-film productions. Casting decisions are highly anticipated and Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black felt like the perfect choice for the high school boy-next-door/werewolf.

Taylor Lautner was only known for one thing before Twilight: His starring role in The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D Like Sharkboy, a film that was aimed entirely at children. Twilight signaled a graduation to more mature performances, not least because of the franchise’s concern with the werewolves’ physics. Lautner’s postTwilight Career was respectable if a little difficult to decide. What has stuck with Lautner all these years is the idea that he gave birth to ancestors, A claim based on Jacob and the werewolves’ Kileut ancestry in Twilight.

Taylor Lautner is not native American (but he claims to have “distant” ancestry)

Lautner has distant Potawatomi and Ottawa Indian heritage

Jacob Black and the other werewolves in Twilight Are all from the Quileute tribe, a real-life Native American people centralized in the western part of Washington state. It is not difficult to understand why casual fans made the leap to assume that Taylor Lautner himself was born American, but Lautner never claimed he was, and neither did the filmmakers. However, during his research for the movie, Lautner discovered that he had some distant Native American ancestry (via MTV),

“And actually, I’m part Native American. We learned that through [preparing for] This film. I am French, Dutch and German, and on my mother’s side, she has some Potawatomi and Ottawa Indian.

The Potawatomi are a Native American people of the Great Lakes region (through PotawatomiHeritage) and the Ottawa are another Great Lakes region Indian tribe (through Ottawa Tribe). However, like many American Indian tribes, they were displaced from their homelands and onto reservations where the majority of their people now reside.

Jacob comes from a long line of shape-shifters and The franchise doesn’t make a clear delineation between being a Quileute and being a shapeshifterRevealing that most of the tribe members are also closed. The Quileutes have a fierce and deadly rivalry with the vampires, especially the Cullens.

How Twilight caused conflict with the real Quileute

Stephanie Meyers took some liberties with Quileute’s story

The presence of the Quileute in Twilight has not gone unnoticed and their depiction in the franchise has come under fire over the years. A New York Times Editor wrote:

“To millions of ‘Twilight’ fans, the Quileute are Indians whose (fictional) ancient treaty turned young males of the tribe into vampire-fighting wolves. To the nearly 700 remaining Quileute Indians, ‘Twilight’ is the reason they are suddenly drawing extraordinary attention from the outside while remaining largely excluded from the vampire series’ vast business empire.

Meyers used some of the tribe’s history for Jacob’s family in her series, making some changes to the story along the way. While skin-walkers are a feature of Native American myth, “Cold ones”, which is used to refer to vampires, do not appear in Quileute mythology.

There is a legend about the first two members of the Quileute tribe being transformed from wolves into humans, but there is no reference to werewolf-like creatures. However, the werewolves in Twilight are much more similar to skin-changers than the Universal Monster’s idea of ​​werewolves. Questionably, the tattoo Jacob shares with the other members of the tribe is based on the art style of a different tribe, the Haida people, and was done by a non-native artist.

The image of Jacob and his tribe as over-sexualized strong men with animalistic tendencies is A racist stereotype about Native Americans that has its roots throughout modern American history. Myers probably didn’t mean to draw the connection, but it’s there nonetheless. Taylor Lautner Playing a Native American is certainly not the worst case of whitewashing in Hollywood history, but it’s good to understand that even unintentional mistakes can be harmful.