The Children of the Desert
So a while ago I came across a post about the fanmade Amavikka culture (for the uninitiated: AO3 link). The post said that, while the fanon was interesting and well-built, OP felt that it did not touch upon an important Tatooine topic: the indigenous Sand People. I was, honestly, baffled, but I couldn't quite pinpoint why. Then I realized my interpretation of the existing Amavikka lore included them, but it was just that, a possible interpretation, or, at most, subtext. Since I'm pretty new to the fandom, now I'm curious about other people's thoughts on the topic.
So. My interpretation.
The Desert as an identifier
As I learnt from this fancomic (x), Sand People is probably what the canon nomad desert-dwellers identify as (supported by the info on Wookieepedia).
Similarly, while the Amavikka are only shown to call themselves Children of Ar-Amu, their metaphors and stories and culture all tie back to the desert. In Fialleril's Trickster Steals The Moon, Depur proclaims himself Master of the Desert, and the slaves are said to be saddened because his darkness falls on the entire desert. In Bedrock, Double Agent!Vader uses as a mantra "I am the desert", and various code-phrases he uses throughout the series are linked to the desert. Thus, I conclude that the Amavikka are a Desert People. Who are the indigenous desert people of Tatooine? The Jawas and the Sand People, and only one of those populations shares humanoid proportions with the majority human slave population.
(I do not accept the Legends canon that Humans and Sand People cannot reproduce together. If a Twi'lek and a Human can reproduce, I don't see why a Sand Person and a Human couldn't, if in fact they are different species, which #doubt.)
So, my understanding is that the Amavikka are a splinter of the Sand People, the descendants of those enslaved by the colonizers, with off-world slaves added in that hybridized them into a separate group.
Runaways
A consistent, recurring theme is that the slaves run away from their owner into the desert.
"At last Ekkreth had traded so many seemingly useless and broken down old materials to the slaves that they were able to build themselves a transport, and they climbed aboard it and escaped, out into the wild desert and the secret places Ekkreth had prepared for them." (Shape-Changer)
"And the people listened, and they learned the secret of Womp Rat and in the darkness they dug a tunnel down, down, down, through the shifting sands and the bedrock beneath, and so escaped from the cage and out into the hidden places in the desert, and in the morning Depur came and found that all his slaves had gone…" (The Slave Who Makes Free)
"Then all the people listened, and they drew together and laid hands on the chains that bound the eldest Grandmother among them, and with the strength of many hands they tore the chain asunder. Then the Grandmother lent her hands to the effort, and another chain was broken, and another and another, until all the people were freed and they disappeared into the desert, following the way Ekkreth had shown them to the place of hidden water. And in the morning when Depur came, he found all his slaves gone. " (The Slave Who Makes Free)
"But Depur said that he was their life. That the water would come now not from the moon, but from him. And so his slaves would be always bound to him, and even the secret places of Ekkreth in the desert would be no refuge, but only places of dryness and death." (Trickster Steals The Moon)
I suppose they could just be hiding there until a ship picks them up (like in Queen's Hope, by E K Johnston), but Fialleril's mythos suggests otherwise. If they were all going off-world, then the symbology is already there to use, the Sky Walker, that turns into a flock of birds and flies away. Instead, there are recurring allusions to the "hidden places in the desert" (and "the place of hidden water" that Ekkreth reveals to the Amavikka could be one of the water wells that Wookieepedia mentions are sacred to the Sand People). And the quote from Trickster Steals The Moon suggests that they need resources in the desert, which implies a long-term stay. So, while some slaves do run away into the stars, others seem to remain on-world, living free in the desert. Who lives in the desert? The Sand People.
My interpretation is that the splintered Amavikka immigrate back into the main Sand People with some frequency, and perhaps slavers capture freeborn Sand People sometimes still, making it so that, while not the exact same, the contact is such that the two groups don't diverge massively either. Note that in many Ekkreth stories, the animals in the desert give the Trickster the knowledge necessary to escape. This could be an allegory of Sand People knowledge being passed down.
This is how Fialleril describes Tena, a mythical Amavikka who has work songs and festivals dedicated to her, after she is Freed by the Storm itself:
"And Tena stood. The veil was drawn from her eyes and she looked and saw her own flesh, knitted together again, whole. But all the skin of her left side was seared by fire, roughened and ridged like dragon scales, and the desert was in her bones." (The Slave Who Makes Free)
This reminds me a bit of how the Tuskens wear masks and coverings, never exposing their bare skin to sunburn, but it's not a clear parallel, and I don't expect everyone else to agree with me on that. I will point out, though, that Tena seeing herself as more animalistic once she survives the desert could be a metaphor for becoming more Sand-People-like, given others' depiction of them.
Sandstorms and social bonds
In Fialleril's fanfic, surviving a desert together makes you family.
"And Luke is very aware, even as he teases Han in turn, that they survived a storm together. That the law of the desert ties them together now, brothers through the storm. " (The Guiding Winds)
The people you travel the desert with are your family. Like Sand People tribes, maybe? Wookieepedia tells me that Sharad Hett and Boba Fett are adopted into one at different points, so it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch.
Anakin's massacre and identity rejection parallels
An interesting thing about this headcanon is that it reinforces the parallel between the victims of Anakin's prequel-trilogy massacres. If Anakin is a member of the Sand People's greater community, like he is a member of the Jedi, the foreshadowing in the first massacre grows. Because a single person he loves is in danger (Shmi, Padme), he is willing to reject and dehumanize an entire people, separating himself from them.
Shmi was Anakin's connection to the Amavikka; in losing her, he loses that part of himself. And I would say that it's not only her death that is the loss, but also the fact that she had a new life: a new house (and an isolated farm, at that, not even in the same town, not even in A town), a new job, a new relationship status, a new (step)son. She's free, or free-ish depending on how you interpret her marriage, and happier, but Anakin has no connection to any of it. The mother, the family, the home of his memories is long gone even before the raid. Anakin is an adult now and comes back to his mother in a place that is not his childhood home, that in Tatooine standards could not be more different. He was Amavikka because he was Shmi's son, but is he still? So he rejects that part of his identity and erases them.
Note that ten years before at the beginning of TPM he was perfectly capable of empathizing with them, sharing water with them. His prejudice was not born of his time on Tatooine. (And other canon sources have there be a Sand Jedi in the Temple at the same time as Anakin, so it's definitely not a Jedi thing either.)
Note also that his commanding the clone slave army is post massacre. I don't consider the Jedi to be the clones' slavers (they're conscripted into the war by the Senate), but it's still weird that Anakin specifically didn't raise a fuss about it. So, my headcanon: he doesn't see himself as Amavikka anymore. He's a Jedi, and Padmé's husband.
Anakin's tether to the Jedi is a bit more difficult to pinpoint, but for the sake of this post, I'll go with a combination of what Padme and Obi-Wan represent. Padme was there for the first meeting he had with Qui-Gon, saving her planet was his first mission, and then being her bodyguard looks like it was his first unsupervised mission. For most of the movie trilogy, saving her is what his Jedi powers are for. And then Sidious tells him it's not enough, and he goes to Obi-Wan.
Much like with Shmi, Anakin hasn't lost Obi-Wan's love when Operation Knightfall happens, but he has lost his relationship. He yearns to be his equal, in an abstract way but also in the very concrete aspect of rank, which the Council denies (as they should). Nevertheless, the position of student offers a comfort, a safety, that Master can come and fix things. (Up to this point, Obi-Wan is Master when they talk.) But at this point in RotS, Anakin is told that Obi-Wan has nothing left to teach him. He's not good enough to be a Master, to save Padme (he wants the rank of Master to research how to save her in the restricted Archives, in Stover's novelization), but he's not Obi-Wan's student anymore either. What is there left, then, to being a Jedi? The ideals that Obi-Wan himself admits Anakin has no loyalty to? He's Padmé's husband. That's what remains. He rejects being a Jedi and erases them too. Men, women and younglings, once more.
The Lars family, conflict, and the DAV
The Lars family is shown repeatedly to be wary of the Sand People, and that violent confrontations can be expected. They are attacked in AotC, and the Obi-Wan Kenobi show has them with rifles at the ready to defend themselves and their property. How do I reconciliate that with Shmi and Beru being Amavikka? Well, mainly because the Lars deliberately pass for slavers. See: the market scene in The Slave Who Makes Free.
"Uncle Owen has a slave-owner’s license. Sometimes he jokes it’s the only real difference between the Empire and the Republic that came before it. Used to be, Uncle Owen says, you could own slaves without a license. Now everything’s regulated. There’s a fee for the license, of course. Every year, they have to renew it. Aunt Beru hates it. She says it’s compounding evil. But every year they pay the fee. Aunt Beru calls it a bribe. She says the word with a quiet rage, hard as stone and ancient as the desert. “The Masters always want to control language,” she tells Luke. “But you are Free. So you call a thing by its name, no matter what the Masters say.” The bribe, or the license, gives them just enough cover when the inspectors come. Owen Lars, like many farmers, keeps a few slaves to help with the farm work. He just never seems to keep them for long." (everything I have ever learned)
Just like Anakin being a double agent in DAV doesn't make most of the Rebel Alliance any less hateful towards him, because they are not in the know, it's entirely plausible that most Sand People wouldn't know that the Lars are secretly singers, and therefore they would receive the same treatment as other slavers.
As an extra, a non-Fialleril fanfic rec: The Gravity of Dual Suns, by RubyofRaven, doesn't follow this headcanon but is an interesting study on Freeborn/Amavikka/Sand People relations through the POV of Beru Whitesun.
TL:DR: I headcanon the Amavikka ARE the Sand People, or at least they intersect significantly, and runaway slaves go into the desert to join a tribe. Who else would they be running towards?
