So if it's not Paladin of Souls, which is the Lois McMaster Bujold book you talked about in your notes? I'm curious 😊
The Sharing Knife! It's a four-book fantasy series in a setting based on the Great Lakes region. I was clueless enough the first time around (and so heavily used to vague-medieval-renaissance-Europe-expy fantasy settings) I didn't realize it the first time I read the series, but it's very obvious once you think about it at all, and sometime in the last two years my library updated the audiobook covers from the original "beautiful high-effort romance novel painting where they're both white" style to the "expressionless racially ambiguous cutouts that make the setting explicit" style:
(These are the same book.)
It's a story about fantasy Native Americans ("Lakewalkers") and fantasy white settlers ("farmers"). The actual cosmology and history of the fantasy world is very different from our own—everyone is native to the same continent, and have been living in roughly the same area for at least a few hundred years—so the politics of settler vs. native don't actually apply in the same way. However, the tension of "people who share the land" vs "people who parcel off the land to sell" is still very present, as is the tension of quasi-nomadic groups with seasonal camp rotations vs. people who stay in place and build large towns with industrial capacity.
And then, of course, there's the magic. The Lakewalkers have limited hereditary magic powers, plus magic monsters they're sworn to fight; the farmers have no magic and no defense against it either. Farmers tend to mistrust Lakewalkers and misunderstand Lakewalker magic; Lakewalkers keep the secrets of their powers under wraps and often look down on farmers as a kind of invasive pest species. As I mentioned in my tags, Lakewalkers' most important magical tools involve someone choosing the time of their death—though typically only when already dying of terminal illness, old age, or a mortal wound.
If you love the movie Ever After like I do, you may remember the part where Danielle says to Leonardo, "A bird may love a fish, Signore, but where would they live?" The Sharing Knife is a series about a bird (Lakewalker) and a fish (farmer) that get engaged halfway through the first book and then spend the next three and a half books figuring out where the hell they're going to live...and slowly realizing they may have to remake society in order to find their place in it.
Even the book where they first get together is not really what you'd call a romance novel, but every book in the series is a lot more focused on a central romantic relationship than most fantasy adventure books, so it's interesting from a genre perspective. "Established relationship" is normally my second-least favorite AO3 (my least favorite being major character death) but the political and magical worldbuilding, and the family dynamics on both sides, kept me very invested even with the amount of meandering domesticity on display throughout the books.
There are some potential triggers to ask about if you have common trauma triggers, and the main romance has a pretty big age gap, which I know is a turn-off for some. But if you ever found yourself asking "why is the Wizarding World's excuse for keeping muggles in the dark so fucking flimsy?" or "how the hell does Wei Wuxian stand living in the Cloud Recesses when most of Lan Wangji's sect hates him?" or "why aren't more fantasy authors as obsessed with craft skills as Tamora Pierce" or "why aren't there more permanently disabled fantasy protagonists who actually have to cope with the limitations created by their disability?" or "why aren't there more fantasy protagonists who genuinely lack magical powers?" then this may be the book series for you.
