In this paper, I will examine the differing representations of Native American heroes in romance fiction novels from the early-to-mid 1990s and the 2010s. While there is little scholarship on representations of Native heroes in romance fiction from the 2010s, communities of authors and readers on personal blogs and sites like Book Riot and Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have published articles featuring culturally sensitive, historically accurate romance novels with Native heroes in order to increase awareness of these books within the subgenre (Avery 2018 Smart Bitches, Trashy Books). Moving into the 21st century and, more specifically, into the 2010s, there appeared to be a shift from the stereotyped portrayals of Native men seen in the late twentieth century to more realistic portrayals of protagonists in both contemporary and historical contexts. Accordingly, popular romance fiction novels from the early-to-mid 1990s often typecast Native American heroes as sex symbols who are objects of the white heroine’s desire (Van Lent, 211 Bird, 68). contemporary romance fiction novels published in the decades after the “post-1972 historical boom” and helped to popularize stories that “depict a love affair…between a European American character (usually the heroine) and a full- or half-blood Native American” (Avery 2018 Wardrop, 61). This pairing between Native heroes and white heroines can be found in U.S. While Anderson’s The Nanny Plan contains an Indigenous heroine and white hero, a larger body of romance fiction novels feature relationships between white heroines and Native or mixed-race heroes. Furthermore, she criticized Anderson’s decision to perpetuate stereotypes about Indigenous people, as this once again placed the narrative of Native characters in the hands of a non-Native author. While Milan’s goal was to draw attention to broader trends of bias and racial prejudice in the romance fiction industry, her tweets shed light on the stereotyped representations of Native heroes and heroines that have persisted in U.S. Milan argued that the novella contains problematic depictions of Indigenous characters, as it “was a book (written by a white author) where the heroine was Native and had a family history of alcoholism and poverty (because of course she did)” while “the hero was a white savior” April 2, 2018). While the novella received mostly positive reviews upon its release, the story was highly criticized by Courtney Milan, a former Director-at-Large for the Romance Writers of America, in a series of tweets in 2018. Anderson won the Contemporary Romance category for The Nanny Plan (2015), a novella that explores the relationship between a billionaire and a Native American heroine (Romance Writers of America GoodReads).
Representations of Native American Heroes During the 1990s and the 2010sĪt the 2016 RITA Awards, author Sarah M.
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