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Divers Traite Cullen Quileutes

The treaty between the Cullens and the Quileutes

"… They claimed to be something different, so we made a treaty with them. If they promised to stay off the Quileute lands, then we wouldn't expose them for what they really were… to the pale-faces."
―Jacob Black[src]

The Treaty is an agreement of peace between the Quileute tribe and the Cullen family made in 1936.

History[]

In 1936, the Cullens (composed by 3 men—Carlisle Cullen, Edward Cullen, Emmett Cullen—and 2 women—Esme Cullen, Rosalie Hale) came across the pack of that generation (represented at the time by 3 shape-shifters—Ephraim Black, Levi Uley, Quil Ateara II) while hunting. They claimed that they did not drink human blood, and Carlisle Cullen offered a treaty between the coven and the pack. The three wolves were outnumbered, so Carlisle had no need to make this offer other than an honest desire to refrain from killing the wolves. For this reason, the Alpha wolf Ephraim Black believed Carlisle was making a genuine offer.

Ephraim insisted on two main point to the treaty: The vampires could not injure any humans (either by hunting them for food or by transforming them into vampires, as the Quileutes viewed this transformation as equal to murder), and the vampires were never to trespass on Quileute land. Carlisle agreed to these terms and proposed adding the concept of mutual secrecy: The Quileutes would not be able to tell anyone the true nature of the Cullens, and vice versa.

Ephraim agreed, and they worked out the boundary lines for their respective lands. The Quileute territory covered all of the reservation, plus some of the land that had traditionally belonged to the Hohs and the Makahs. In some places, the boundary line followed the main road, now Highway 101, but in others it followed the old tribal lines. In turn, the shape-shifters would not cross into Cullen land. The town of Forks, along with a few other surrounding towns, and the highway were "truce areas" where both the Quileute shape-shifters and the Cullens were allowed to venture.

As the years passed and the Cullens moved elsewhere, the younger members of the Quileute tribe began to think of the treaty between the cold ones and the shape-shifters as part of a land, not factual truth.

The Cullens returned to the area in 2003, and Jacob Black later told human Bella Swan that the Cullens were vampires who had made a treaty with his werewolf great-grandfather, Ephraim. He thought he was only telling her a scary story, but in fact, he unknowingly broke the treaty.

The Cullens' return had a huge impact on the tribe, especially those who had inherited the extra chromosome and who were in the right age range to transform. Shape-shifters hadn't existed in the Quileute tribe since Ephraim's pack. But the number of vampires in the Cullen coven caused an unusually large number of tribe members to become werewolves. The result was the largest wolf pack the tribe had seen since the days of the first shape-shifter.

Three exceptions were made: in Eclipse, when Carlisle and Edward enter the Quileute lands to tend to Jacob's wounds after a battle against an army of newborn vampires: and two other in Breaking Dawn, when Jacob permits Edward to turn Bella into a vampire, and when Sam Uley permits Alice and Jasper to cross over to access the ocean. Whilst the Cullens were hunting Victoria, she was clever enough to keep swapping the sides of the treaty lands.

Note[]

  • In Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined, where most characters mirroring the original Twilight series were swapped in gender, Edythe Cullen violated the treaty by biting Beau Swan after the vampire venom he received from the vicious vampire, Joss, spread too far into his system and added her own venom to quicken the process. She and Archie justified this by saying that they did not make an oath to the treaty, whereas Carine did. Jacob's female counterpart, Julie Black also unwittingly violated the treaty by telling Beau about her tribe's history with vampires, thinking it as a legend.


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