“La Push, baby!” exclaims a minor character in the film Twilight. As catchphrases go, it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, but one can nevertheless find it printed on shirts and cross-stitched onto fabrics. La Push, in the billion-dollar Twilight franchise, is the home of the shape-changing werewolves who combat vampires.

The reality is more pedestrian. La Push, on the Olympic Peninsula, is the reservation of the Quileute Nation. It’s a small community with a population under 500, so the Twilight fans have had a major effect (though not always a positive one). Tourists arrive by bus, purchase souvenirs, and, following the lead of Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, break La Push’s rules to collect stones and driftwood from the beach.

It’s curious to see such a tiny place loom large in so many minds via fantasy novels, but it’s not the first time. As I was surprised to learn, La Push also features in another franchise: Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, the first of which was the basis for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Hollywood blockbuster. And whereas Stephenie Meyer had never been to La Push when she drafted her first novel, Herbert lived nearby, visited, and had close connections.

As a youth, Herbert became close with a man he called “Indian Henry,” who, in his account, semi-adopted him for two years and showed him how to live off the land. Henry was a member of the Hoh Nation, an offshoot of the Quileute people, Herbert says. The Indian rolls from the time strongly suggest that “Indian Henry” was Henry Martin, also known as Han-daa-sho – that name suggests he was an individual of recognized spiritual power. Martin had lived at La Push before meeting Herbert.

Henry Martin wasn’t the last La Push resident to leave a mark on Herbert’s life. As an adult, he became close to Howard Hansen, known also as cKulell, who had grown up on the reservation. Hansen wasn’t an enrolled member of the Quileute Nation, as his parentage was obscure, but he’d been specially trained in Quileute culture and lore. He was also a staunch environmentalist, who wrote a book about what logging by nearby white-owned firms had done to La Push.

There’s every reason to think that Martin and Hansen mattered to Frank Herbert. In the midst of writing the Dune saga, Herbert paused to write a seemingly autobiographical novel about the relationship between a young white boy and an older Hoh man who shows him how to survive in the wild—a fictionalized version of Herbert’s relationship to Martin. In it, the stand-in for Martin complains of the toll logging has taken on Indian lands.

In the case of Howard Hansen, the influence is even clearer. Herbert named Hansen the godfather to one of his sons. He read Hansen’s environmentalist tract in draft. Hansen warned his friend that the fate of La Push might be the fate of the world. “White men are eating the earth,” Hansen told Herbert. “They’re gonna turn this whole planet into a wasteland, just like North Africa.” Herbert, already thinking of his novel in progress, agreed, responding that the world would become a “big dune.”

Just as Hansen warned, La Push was a harbinger. Now, the idea of the “whole planet” turning into “a wasteland” no longer seems the stuff of science fiction. And as the seas rise and waves grow tall, the coastal village of La Push is dealing with the worst of it.

And it’s doing so largely alone. Entertainment profits skyrocket, yet the tribe still struggles with poverty. Despite its role in two vastly lucrative franchises, La Push is still raising money to move its facilities, especially its tribal school, to higher ground to escape flooding.

The small world of La Push became a model for the large one of Dune, and through Dune readers glimpsed what global warming might do to earth. Now Earth is in peril, and La Push is ground zero.

Daniel Immerwahr is a professor of history at Northwestern University and the author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. Read his full article “The Quileute Dune: Frank Herbert, Indigeneity, and Empire” published in Journal of American Studies, free to access on Cambridge Core now.