On a contrasting note, citing a bias towards culturalism in the textual critiques of Hertha Sweet Wong and Paula Gunn Allen, Ojibwe writer and literary critic David Treuer cautions against imposing unqualified notions of Native American "polyvocality" and narrative egalitarianism on the text of "Love Medicine." Treuer argues that the what readers experience as "polyvocality" is actually a proliferation of personal symbols, and that on the level of language, all the narrators of "Love Medicine," in fact, inhabit the same consciousness. Treuer points to a tension between the "language of event," marked by stark naturalism, and the "language of thought," marked by rich symbolism and metaphors, and how all the chapters of "Love Medicine" "use a mixture of fact and fancy, a mixture of the figure and the figurative, to create its tensions and to resolve them." Thus, according to Treuer, "Love Medicine" is a product of literary techniques that derive predominantly from Western Fiction. Examining the opening chapter of "Love Medicine", Treuer notes that beyond surface similarities, there is little that ties the text to well known Ojibwe Wenabozaho narratives. Treuer takes pain to note that he is not advocating for an understanding of "Love Medicine" that is devoid of Indigenous cultural context; to the contrary, Treuer argues, Erdrich's genius is in summoning an "idea of [Ojibwe] culture," and expressing Indigenous yearning for such culture, in a literary environment that is not its own.