Breaking Dawn, Part 2: Culturally Inclusive, or Culturally Insensitive?

For the first four movies of the Twilight saga, the answer to the title question is obvious: yes, this series is one of the most culturally insensitive movies about Native Americans since Disney's Pocahontas:

My face is this sad because now millions of children will think that Native Americans run
around the forest in sexy, short dresses,  paint with all the colors of the wind, and have a special ability to understand native wildlife.

While it's tempting to be hard on the high muckity-mucks who apparently engineered such cinematic missteps, especially since it's cases of racism we're dealing with, it's helpful to recall that the ignorance that causes racism is not a crime but a shame. Yes, one might indeed argue that Stephanie Meyer's portrayal of Native Americans is one-dimensional, narrow, and diminishing, but, then again, so is the entire Twilight series, to just about everyone in it (unless you happen to be a white male). Thus, it would be silly to suggest that Stephanie Meyer "has it out" for the Native Americans -- though, yes, she clearly failed to do her research and represented the Quileute tribe as both caricatures and, perhaps most offensively, actual animals (supernatural, yes, but still animals). No, instead it is a shame that Meyer did not do her research before molding an entire culture to her storytelling whims, for she could have had the opportunity to present tribal life in a much more beneficial and realistic way. The Quileute tribe actually exists, by the way, which adds a whole new level of colonial oppression and horror to the scenario. Do you see what I'm getting at? While bigoted or reductive interpretations of other cultures is upsetting, it's more of a shame (caused by ignorance, remedied by education) than a direct and pinpointed affront deserving of our critical anger. Good, now that that's clear....
Look at these pictures. They're of South American vampires Senna and Zafrina, who will be introduced in Breaking Dawn, Part 2, this November.

According to the Meyer's novel version, Senna and Zafrina arrive in Forks as representatives of "the Amazonian coven." To Meyer, it seems that the Amazon is some great, unexplored, unnamed wilderness and so one can just say people are "from the Amazon" like they're "from Africa" or "from Europe." No. Geography lesson:

See that place marked "the Amazon Basin"? It covers most of South America, 1.7 billion acres, and belongs to nine nations. But Zafrina and Senna? Who knows where, exactly, they're from. It's not important, right? It's just important that they look ethnic.

Hopefully, the movie will reveal the characters' exact origins, but so far, Zafrina and Senna roles appear to be relatively minor; they are described in various Breaking Dawn wikis and write-ups to be "from South America," which obviously is an even broader area than "The Amazon." Though we could spend quite some time on how angering that whole debacle is, let's get off of that tangent for a minute and focus on one of the most superficial issues here. To be honest, I can't believe that no one in the media has protested this yet, and by "this" I mean the attire of the so-called "South American vampire coven." Here's one of the actual stills released from Breaking Dawn, Part 2, and it's worth at least a thousand words:

Here, Zafrina (played by Judi Shekoni) and Senna (played by Tracey Heggins) are having a conversation with Bella and Edwards' offspring, Renesmee.  To put the actors' attitudes in context, here's an excerpt from an interview appearing on breakingdawnmovie.com; Judi Shekoni stated "I went to the London Zoo pretty early on and met up with Tracey [Heggins].  We came up with the idea of them [Senna and Zafrina] having these animalistic qualities.  We actually went to the LA Zoo together before we started shooting.  We looked through all the animals and decided which animal we can pick our movement from. We came up with the black jaguar, because there are a lot of them in the Amazon and they have these beautiful bright eyes that very similar to vampire eyes.  We’d go to the zoo, using video and watching the animals in real life and taking pictures, deciding which aspect.  Basically, they have a lot of power and a lot of energy in their shoulders."

There you have it: the actors came up with the idea of acting animalistic in order to portray a specific (yet unnamed) race of people, and the directors did nothing to discourage what was a potentially offensive choice -- to be honest, they probably encouraged it: "Actually, it’s quite funny on set, Stephenie Meyer came up to us at one point and said she noticed our vampires are really different from the other ones.  She really noticed us and thought it was really pure.  It was all a success for it to be noticed by Stephenie," Shekoni's concluded in the aformentioned interview. 

And finally, I get to say it: WHAT ARE THEY WEARING?

The Native American tribes of the Twilight saga aren't forced into traditional garb; why do the Amazonian coven? And is that clothing accurate? Who's to say, because we don't actually know where the characters are from, exactly. How fair is it for the producers, directors, and everyone involved in Twilight

to support an image of another race that (unfortunately, because of the minimal amount of ethnic diversity in the cinema) will unfairly be seen as representatives of their people? And why must that image be as sexualized as possible? Other vampires get to keep all their clothes on:

Interestingly, this is the only still that I could find of the whole group. I'm not sure what they're doing, maybe being stunned by their awesome whiteness.

These are issues that need to be taken more seriously in today's cinema, and I find it both disturbing and distressing that no critic has commented on such an obvious shortcoming; in a series as popular and influential to today's youth as the Twilight saga, there really is no good excuse for such a bizarre and parochial portrayal of non-white culture.