It hit me that when I agreed to be Eugene's friend, I was practically engaged to his sister Yvette. In a traditional white culture, the custom is for the guy to ask a girl's father for her hand in marriage. White society is patrilocal as well as patrilineal. Most North American Native societies are also patrilineal, but unlike white society they are matrilocal. If you want to marry a native girl, you make friends with her brother; it is the brother's consent that matters. The logic is that the brother knows the guys in the field better than a father could, and knows who will treat his sister better. When a guy marries a native girl, he is not expected to take her away from her home, he is accepted into her home. In a native society, it is acceptable behavior for a girl who wants to marry a guy, to send her brother out to make friends with him.

Yvette's absence at the end of the dance was understandable. My appearance in her life was like a bolt out of the blue, and being an intelligent and attractive girl, she had a boyfriend in the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta.  Her problem was that at 16, she was expected to be producing a family of her own, or at least seeking a man.