In the vein of contemporary Native American literatures, many characters in "Love Medicine" are in search of an identity. David Treuer identifies "the search for cultural reconnection" as a driving force of Native American fiction, arguing that "self-recovery is achieved through cultural recovery." Speaking of her own mixed-blood heritage, Erdrich has explained in an interview that “one of the characteristics of being a mixed blood is searching…all of our searches involve trying to discover where we are from.” Louis Owens and Catherine Rainwater have noted that the positionality of Native Americans and writers both coincide on the margins, as people that must observe from the outside. Owens states that “the seemingly doomed Indian, or tortured mixed-blood caught between worlds surfaces in Erdrich’s fiction, but such characters tend to disappear behind those other, foregrounded characters who hang on in spite of it all […] and, like a story teller, weave a fabric of meaning and significance out of the remnants.”