Ewoks: Endor, the Miwok, Why They Tried to Cook Han Solo and Whether They Ate Stormtroopers

The Ewoks entered Star Wars on May 25, 1983, in Return of the Jedi, as the inhabitants of the forest moon the Empire had chosen to shield its second Death Star. They are a metre tall, covered in brown, black or ginger fur, hooded in leather, armed with spears, slings and stone axes, and they live in villages of huts built on platforms high in trees whose trunks are the size of towers; Princess Leia, separated from the strike team, is found by one named Wicket, and the rest of the rebels are captured by his tribe and hung over a fire as an offering to C-3PO, whom the Ewoks take for a deity. The droid talks them round, the tribe joins the fight, and in the film's third act a Stone Age people defeat an Imperial legion with logs, tripwires, rocks and gliders while the fleet fights overhead.

George Lucas had written the battle for Wookiees. Chewbacca was meant to lead his people against the Empire, but by 1983 the Wookiee was a co-pilot who repaired hyperdrives, and Lucas wanted a primitive species whose victory would make his point about technology; he cut the Wookiee down to a metre and rearranged the name. The forest was Northern California, the redwoods of Marin County and the groves around Crescent City, and the Miwok, the people whose country it had been, gave the species the other half of its name. The Ewoks' celebration song that ends the film, "Yub Nub," was replaced in the 1997 Special Edition by an orchestral piece, one of the most argued-about of Lucas's revisions.

Ewoks are omnivores, hunters and gatherers, and their attempt to cook the heroes is treated by the film as ordinary hospitality. They are strong for their size, climb like animals, and see well in the dark of the forest floor; they have a shaman, Logray, a chief, Chirpa, and a religion of the great trees in which C-3PO fits without difficulty; and they build with a sophistication the rest of their technology lacks, including hang-gliders and catapults that the battle puts to use. Their language, Ewokese, was built by the sound designer Ben Burtt from recordings of an elderly speaker of Kalmyk, a Mongolic language of the Caspian steppe, mixed with Tibetan and other sources, so that the chatter of the villages is a real language rearranged.

The costumes were the film's hardest. Some forty performers, most of them under four feet, wore full fur suits with mechanical faces on a set where the temperature in the redwoods reached the eighties, and the crew worked in shifts to keep them from overheating; Warwick Davis, an eleven-year-old who had come to the production as an extra, was moved into the Wicket suit when Kenny Baker, R2-D2's performer, was ill, and became the species' face. His Wicket is curious, brave and a little foolish, and Lucas, who had wanted the audience to see the battle through a child, got what he wanted from a child.

Lucas made the Ewoks the first Star Wars spin-off. Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure aired on ABC on November 25, 1984, a television film in which two human children stranded on Endor are helped by Wicket's tribe to rescue their parents from a giant, and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor followed on November 24, 1985, with a darker story in which most of the first film's family is killed in the opening minutes; an animated series, Ewoks, ran for two seasons on ABC from 1985, and the character had toys, a breakfast cereal and, for a few years, a place in children's television that no other Star Wars species has held. The films were cheap and gentle and are remembered fondly by those who were the right age and with embarrassment by the franchise.

The Ewoks' other legacy is an argument. The second Death Star, destroyed in orbit above their moon, would have rained debris on Endor, and a 1997 essay proposed that the Ewok victory had been followed by an extinction, the Endor Holocaust, which fans have debated with astrophysics and cynicism ever since; the franchise answered obliquely in 2019, showing Wicket and his son watching the fireworks of the final film's victory, alive. The Ewoks divided audiences from the beginning, between those who found them a children's toy in a war film and those who understood that the film was about a children's toy winning a war, and The Phantom Menace's Gungans, sixteen years later, took the argument to a place the Ewoks had never gone.

The Ewoks are not aliens of the lore in any direct way. Nobody has reported a metre-high furred hunter beside a saucer, and the closest the records come are the hairy dwarfs of the 1954 South American wave, small clawed beings said to have attacked witnesses in Venezuela, which the Wookiee article describes, and the general category of small beings in the woods that the guide to reported alien types lists. Their real ancestry is folklore. Every forest culture has a small people who live in the trees, help or trick travellers and are best appeased with food, and the Ewoks are that people in fur, with a reverence for a golden visitor that borrows, whether Lucas meant it or not, from the stories of gods arriving from the sky that the star people legends article collects from the Miwok's neighbours and from peoples across the Americas.

The name is the film's one direct debt to those peoples. The Coast Miwok lived in what is now Marin County, the Sierra Miwok in the foothills, and the redwood groves that played Endor stand in their country; Lucas took the sound and left the history, which is how Star Wars has always used the world. Yoda's species, small, wise and forest-dwelling, is the Ewoks' obvious relative in the same franchise, and the idea that a primitive people could defeat a technological empire, which the Ewoks were built to demonstrate, is one that the real UFO lore inverts: in the reports it is always the visitors who have the technology, and we who have the spears.