Sandbender Tribes

The sandbender tribes are indigenous people of the Earth Kingdom living on the outskirts in the desert. They travel across the sand dunes by sand-sailors, pushing them onwards with a tornado of sand, controlled by their sandbending, a special bending technique of earthbending.

There are various tribes of sandbenders, one of them being the Hami Tribe. Due to the abundance of sand in their homeland, they have developed a special style of earthbending that revolves around bending loose sand instead of solid earth. Because of sand's shifty nature, sandbending techniques resemble water- and airbending more than standard earthbending.

They are distrustful and dismissive of foreigners, and some sandbenders have made a habit of stealing from them, most notably Ghashiun and his gang. One tradition of the tribes is that if they have wronged strangers in some way, they must provide hospitality to them. Sandbenders are also known to scavenge for dead animals.

Trivia

 * The sandbenders bear a slight resemblance to the Tusken Raiders (Sand People) from the Star Wars universe, who in turn were inspired by the Fremen desert dwellers from the Dune novels. They were probably inspired by the real Bedouin Arab tribes that inhabit the Middle East and North Africa.
 * The Hami Tribe may be named after the Hami Desert, a section of the Gobi Desert in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
 * The goggles they wear to shade their eyes from the sun and keep sand out look very similar to the ones the invasion force wore during the Invasion of the Fire Nation on the Day of Black Sun.