First note the ludicrous title of this NY Times Op-Ed:
And now the only slightly more foolish subject:
ALL the world, it seems, has been bitten by “Twilight.” Conservative estimates place revenue generated from Stephenie Meyer’s vampire chronicles — the books, movies and merchandise — in the billion-dollar range. Scarcely mentioned, however, is the effect that “Twilight” has had on the tiny Quileute Nation, situated on a postage stamp of a reservation, just one square mile, in remote La Push, Wash.
To millions of “Twilight” fans, the Quileute are Indians whose (fictional) ancient treaty transforms 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 they themselves remain largely excluded from the vampire series’ vast commercial empire.
…
Yet the tribe has received no payment for this commercial activity. Meanwhile, half of Quileute families still live in poverty.
They are simply a group of people, and are not entitled to money just because the work was used in a successful work of fiction. Hundreds of millions of Catholics live in poverty and one one at the NY Times asked that Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code author) pony up money for that. No one asked that the billions from the movie Titanic go to the decadents of the show’s victim though surely there are some poor victims in that lot. No one asked that the the profits of Schindler’s list go to helping poor Jews. Examined in a broader context it would be a kind of group ownership of the trademark of the name of a people with some sort of common experience. I seriously doubt we would want that as a matter of public policy. But we aren’t see advocacy for that policy, we are just seeing advocacy for Indians to be treated that way. In this way they are infantilized. Somehow, the writer believes they have no other way to make a living and are exploited for being portrayed in largely a positive light by the books and so therefore deserve to share in the works’ success though they contributed nothing to it. Is is hard to see how they are in any way being sucked dry. Indians are just normal people and deserve no special treatment or privileges in their name being used in creative works .
