Johanna Hoorenman notes how romance novels with Native American protagonists have mostly been written by white authors for a white audience. Those novels tend to be set in an idyllic, ahistorical past which avoids periods and events that would force their authors to address the violence against, and oppression of, Native Americans throughout the U.S.’s past. Hoorenman focuses on Kathleen Eagle who, though not a Native American herself, has close ties to, and experience of living among, the Lakota Sioux. By depicting contemporary Native Americans while showing their ties to their history, Eagle’s Fire and Rain (1994), she suggests, avoids “the stereotypical depiction of Native people in historical settings” which have served to deny the continued existence of Native American people and their cultures into the present. (5-6)
From the introduction: