In the Star Wars film trilogy, the Tusken Raiders are cartoon native villains.
They are one of the native sentient species of Tatooine who first appear in A New Hope, where they attack Luke Skywalker for no reason until Obi-Wan scares them away with dragon noises. In Attack of the Clones, they kill Shmi Skywalker, and experience a little Dark Side genocide at the hands of Anakin Skywalker.
They are faceless indigenous stereotypes that are violent. They're disposable enough for a Galactic senator to marry a guy who admits to killing every single one of them.
The Tusken Raiders were reintroduced in the second season of The Mandalorian. They are shown to coordinate with Tatooine settlers to take down a Krayt dragon for the first time. They have a specific role in Tatooine's cultural history as an indigenous people fighting off colonizers who steal the planet's resources.
Water is one of those resources that puts the raid on the farm into an awkward new context. The Book of Boba Fett continues the story of the oppression of the Tusken by having Boba lead them against the supply trains that run through their land before they are slaughtered again.
The role of Western "savage" stand-ins was played by Boba's time with the Tuskens. It's been done hundreds of times in modern stories, including Dances With Wolves, Fern Gully, and Lawrence of Arabia, where a lone outsider is captured by an indigenous group before he proves himself worthy of tribal acceptance.
In modern stories, a lone outsider is captured by a group that is hostile to him, and then he is shown to be worthy of tribal acceptance.
Even though the original Star Wars is heavily influenced by traditional Westerns, repeating that pattern with Boba Fett and the Tusken Raiders is either a huge red flag or a signal that The Book of Boba Fett is laying some groundwork for a further subversion.
The Book of Boba Fett has a simple question: Why did Boba Fett want to take over Jabba/Bib Fortuna's crime syndicate? The answer that he's "tired of working for idiots who are going to get me killed" is offered in Episode 4.
That seems reasonable, except for the fact that there are a million jobs that don't involve working for idiots. Taking over a criminal operation's turf is a huge undertaking, and so is going to war with the Pyke syndicate over a territory that didn't have to be Boba's problem in the first place.
After getting his ship back, Boba's first order of business was to destroy the bike gangs that were tormenting his allies. The centuries of Tatooine colonization made the Tuskens vulnerable to multiple genocides, so taking out one gang isn't exactly revenge. If Boba Fett's desire to take power on Tatooine and take down the Pyke Syndicate isn't necessarily for the good of the planet, but a further step in a plan to remake Tatooine for the people who've been fighting planetary outsiders for generations, what would
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Through the Book of Boba Fett, it's shown that Boba wants an unadorned path towards war, instead of the trappings of gatra leadership. He doesn't want to be seen as having a specific claim to the territory and is working on a longer game where he cleans up colonizing forces on Tatooine and gives the power to someone else when he's done. There was a group of people who had a claim on the land when Tatooine was an ocean.
This isn't to say that The Book of Boba Fett is going to change Star Wars history or make the Raiders a force for good. Murder and raiding is a bad thing and it's clear that some Tusken clans shouldn't be in charge of a planet. It's clear that Star Wars is a universe where people blow up planets every other movie or so, grow human children in a lab to use as cannon fodder, and put a collection of sex-starved wizards in charge of galactic peacekeeping.
The Tuskens didn't do anything, and even he got a redemption arc.
It is possible that The Book of Boba Fett is willing to make a statement about the gray areas between colonization and violence, as well as the moral imperative to return ancestral ownership and avoid perpetuateing indigenous narrative stereotypes. It's possible that Boba Fett has been looking for Jabba's throne for years and just wants it. The next few episodes of The Book of Boba Fett will be crucial to finding out if Star Wars is willing to break away from the original trilogy's Western roots.
The Book of Boba Fett is available on Disney+.