Tatooine’s Tusken Raiders hated outlanders, attacking all those who trespassed on their territories and raiding outlanders’ towns and farms. Tuskens were an unexpected hazard during the Boonta Eve Classic, camping out on a ridge and firing their blasters at the podracer pilots on the course below.

A decade after leaving Tatooine, Anakin Skywalker returned to discover what had happened to his mother Shmi. To his horror, he learned Sand People had kidnapped her from the Lars moisture farm. Shmi’s husband, Cliegg Lars, told Anakin that his mother had to be dead after a month as a Tusken captive. But Anakin knew she was alive.

Anakin discovered his mother in a Tusken camp, alive but near death after weeks of ritual torture. When Shmi died in his arms, Anakin gave into his rage. He ignited his lightsaber and massacred the Tuskens.

A generation later, Luke Skywalker grew up on the Lars farm, wary of Sand People and their bold nighttime raids. After R2-D2 left the Lars farm in search of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke and C-3PO followed the little droid into the Jundland Wastes, unaware that Tuskens had spotted Luke’s landspeeder.

The Tuskens passed up the chance to fire at Luke’s landspeeder, instead clambering onto their bantha mounts to attack the young moisture farmer after he located R2-D2.

A Tusken with a gaderfii knocked Luke unconscious, and the Sand People began to loot his landspeeder. But then a ghastly howl sent them fleeing. It sounded like a krayt-dragon call, but it was actually a clever imitation by Obi-Wan – one of many tricks the former Jedi had picked up during his years in exile.

When Luke and Obi-Wan came across the burned-out shell of a Jawa sandcrawler, Luke assumed the destruction was the work of the Sand People – after all, he spotted bantha tracks and a dropped gaderfii. But Obi-Wan read the signs more closely, and knew better – the Jawas had been killed by Imperial stormtroopers.

After the destruction of the Death Star, Vader was forced to return to Tatooine on a mission for the Emperor. It was an unwelcome return – Vader’s long-ago failure to save his mother when he was Anakin Skywalker still gnawed at him. When bounty hunters answered the Dark Lord’s summons, they found him in the desert, surrounded by the corpses of Tuskens he had slain.