NEW YORK: The Romance Writers of America has withdrawn an award for a novel widely criticized for its sympathetic portrait of a cavalry officer who participated in the slaughter of Lakota Indians at the Battle of Wounded Knee.
On July 31, RWA judges gave Karen Witemeyer’s At Love’s Command the Vivian Award for best romance book “with religious or spiritual elements.” Witemeyer’s book centers on Matthew Hanger, a veteran from the 1890 massacre whose Christian faith helps him reconcile with the past.
News of the award for At Love’s Command was greeted on social media with anger and disbelief, especially after the RWA initially said that the spiritual category concerned characters who find redemption for their moral failings and or crimes against humanity. Author Delaney Williams, a Native American, tweeted that the RWA was honoring stories in which the genocide of my ancestors are used as a plot convention to gain forgiveness, not from those killed, but from a foreign god. A…