By Jason Liu
Artwork by Eric Kim, Design Lead

You’re probably familiar with the more flagrant forms of indigenous representation in entertainment and popular culture – for example, earlier this month, the Washington Redskins finally rebranded as the Commanders after 87 years of playing under that racialized name in the NFL. Many readers could tease out why the old name could be considered offensive – the name focuses on a stereotyped slur for skin color and the logo inaccurately essentializes all Native American tribes as “people wearing headdresses”, etc. Stereotyping of Native Americans is likely a familiar topic to this paper’s US-centric reader base, and thus readers are likely to have an intuition as to how to judge specific instances of representation.

That intuition likely fails when trying to answer the question “Is the Star Wars character Boba Fett an example of offensive representation of Māori culture?”, because you may have some follow-up questions: “Who is Boba Fett?” “Who are the Māori?” “How is a space fantasy even related?” If these are questions you are asking, then let me provide some context, not merely to judge this example, but to rethink how we intuitively judge whether representation is “positive” or not.

The Māori are the indigenous people of New Zealand, originating from the Polynesian migrations across the Pacific Ocean. This origin features heavily in their oral tradition, celebrating the bravery of their explorer predecessors. So too did they celebrate conflict – it is written into their own creation myths, in which the god of war Tūmatauenga literally consumes his brethren, turning them into the trees, fish, and other “common” (noa) things that make up the Māori world. The first observations European explorers ever made about the Māori highlight this warrior identity.

European occupation was a long way off. By 1830, despite there being an estimated 2,000 Europeans living among the Māori, they coexisted with (and some identified with) the native population. Such Europeans were known as Pākehā among the Maori, who valued what the Europeans had to offer, including weaponry and even their support as mercenaries in inter-tribal fights. Eventually, a combination of infighting and epidemics incite Great Britain to intervene and formally annex New Zealand in 1840. 

Though initially guaranteeing autonomy for the Māori, the British Crown seized most tribal land in the aftermath of the New Zealand land wars of the 1860s, ensuring Māori decline. By 1900, the estimated pre-European population of 100,00 had fallen to 42,000. The Māori people’s health has never fully recovered from this decline, with a seven-year gap in life expectancy between Māori and non-Māori persisting since the 1990s. Overrepresentation in prison populations, depressed home ownership rates, disproportionate poverty, and other societal ills continue to highlight the effects of colonization on the Māori.

Yet despite all of this, the Māori culture is seen to have gone through a revival. The interconnectivity of European and Māori society continued from their first interaction, with significant intermarriage between the two groups. Over time, Maori traditions were signifiers of not just an indigenous, but a national identity, driving a desire to preserve them and integrate them into a broader culture. 

The perhaps most successful example of this revival is the Maori language, which is now an official language of the country, seeing usage in everything from public programming to casual slang and contemporary music. The government has set goals to teach the language in all schools by 2025 and to aim for 20% of the nation’s population to have basic literacy in the language by 2040. That’s a far cry from its banned usage in schools in the previous century.

On the flip side, this revival raises concerns of cultural appropriation. Perhaps the biggest signifier of this is the haka, a ceremonial Māori dance recognizable by its rhythmic chanting and stomping. Though it’s not just a warrior tradition, its association as a battle-ready performance of strength is the one that has persisted in popular culture, an association little different than what the first Europeans made about the Māori being a proud warrior race. Today, the haka reappears in many forms: school performances, ambassadorial welcoming parties, and sport traditions that probably won’t be “Washington Commandeered” any time soon. Oh, by the way, it’s also used as a symbol of anti-vaccination protests. Because of course it is.

It’s inarguable that the Maori people and culture would not have survived without the well-intentioned intervention and in part genuine self-identification of those not originally members of said culture. At the same time, part of the original intention behind these traditions has been superseded by an expression of an ill-defined, catch-all cultural pride. 

Star Wars has become the newest example of this diluted representation. But in order to understand how this came to be, the intent behind it, and ultimately whether it should be applauded or condemned, we have to understand how an armor-clad bounty hunter with only four lines became so much more than his outward appearance.

Boba Fett didn’t even have a name when he appeared in The Empire Strikes Back, but fans latched onto his cool demeanor, badass knight-like armor, and general mystique that kept fans talking about the character long after his apparent death in the following movie. Perhaps it was this organic fan theorization that pushed director George Lucas to build a mythos behind the character when writing for his prequel trilogy. Boba Fett’s armor became the symbol of the Mandalorians, a proud warrior race that protected their traditions and armor with their lives. Boba Fett got a father, Jango Fett, who would this time be an essential character to the plot of the prequel trilogy as the genetic origin for the Republic’s millions-strong clone army. In this way, Lucas had retroactively given birth to two new “peoples” from a single character, who now needed an actor to give it life.

Temuera Morrison had first achieved international fame in the movie Once Were Warriors for his role as the abusive patriarch of the Māori family central to the story. Around the same time, Lucas was filming in Sydney and thus relied on actors from Australia and New Zealand. According to Morrison, his casting as Jango Fett was a matter of happenstance.

Personally, I’m not so certain. Star Wars has a history of using racial stereotypes to inform worldbuilding. In the original trilogy, scenes set on the desert planet of Tatooine were filmed in Tunisia, which informed the usage of aliens as racial stand-ins; the Sand Peoples’ robed garb and savage violence are unflattering portrayals of Bedouin Arabs. The prequel trilogy of movies that Jango Fett comes from has been roundly condemned for its usage of Arab, Jewish, Asian and even Caribbean caricatures for a slew of characters and races.

With that track record, I’m not sure the Mandalorians, a race identifiable more by their warrior emblems than their actual faces, and the clones, homogenized to the greatest possible extreme, can escape comparison to the Māori and how they’ve been assimilated both racially and culturally to the country at large.

Whether or not Lucas had Temuera Morrison’s Māori heritage in mind when making his writing decisions, this casting had permanent implications on the Star Wars mythos. Voice acting for future portrayals of clone characters were modeled after Morrison’s performance. Morrison himself lent his voice to redub over actor Jeremy Bulloch as Boba Fett in new releases of The Empire Strikes Back. And now, Temuera Morrison plays a revived and aged Boba Fett in the flesh, first in his appearance in The Mandalorian and now as the star of his own show, The Book of Boba Fett.

By this point, the Māori inspirations have been made explicit. During shooting for The Mandalorian, Morrison apparently showed off his traditional haka dance. Creator Jon Favreau saw this and decided to find a way to incorporate this into the choreography for Boba Fett’s debut fight (in the process conflating the dance with “fighting style”). To do this, they gave Morrison a custom-made quote-on-quote “Māori” weapon suited for the choreography, modeled off of a prop with existing Star Wars origins: the gaffi stick, the weapon of the Sand People. In The Book of Boba Fett, it is shown that Boba Fett befriended, fought with, and learned from the Sand People’s traditions, including how to craft a gaffi stick and even their traditional dance, which looks suspiciously similar to the haka. 

Yes, the stand-ins for Arabs have now become stand-ins for Māori, and the actual Māori actor is positioned as a culturally accepting “white savior” to the faceless, exoticized “members” of his own heritage.

I think there’s genuine intent behind this retroactive recharacterization. The actor gets to associate his heritage with a generationally-beloved character. The Sand People get to be reparatively rewritten as allies of a hero, shifting the lens to show their way of life as deserving of fascination and respect. By proxy, they probably thought this was a positive representation of Māori culture. I, at least, can’t deny that these decisions have made the characters far more interesting and thoughtful than their original one-dimensional selves.

But it goes to show how fluid racial representations become when you break them down into essentialized traits. This is how you get a Native American caricature somehow representing a football team, a ceremonial dance somehow representing anti-vaccine protest, and a fictional tribe of cloth-clad raiders somehow representing Māori culture more authentically than the actor literally born in it.

When you choose to describe a culture in as simple of terms as “proud warriors”, you can put “positive” representation anywhere.