ecovlke's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter 20: I Was Engaged To My Cousin Chapter 20: I Was Engaged To My Cousin I promised I would write about this event back on 11-05-01 (From the entry titled Chapter 18: The Rise And FALL Of 1987). It's a little story I like to call "I Was Engaged To My Cousin". Yep, I was engaged to my cousin. A bitter-sweet tale of love found and love lost. Before I begin, I would like to quickly go over the concept of clans and extended family for those unaquainted with this form of kinship ties as practiced by my people, the Mvskoke (Creek). Clan membership is passed on from the mother's side. It is usually named for an animal, a vegetable, or the wind according to our creation story. People from these clans are considered to be related even if it is not by blood. Extended family ties come from anybody who may be related by blood, no matter how distant that relation may be, to another person regardless of clan. In other words they are your "cousin". Now with that brief explination, let's continue with the show... It was my first day of college. I had been out of high school for seven years before I decided to go to college. It was an Indian school with lots of Indian girls. LOTS. It was a cold January morning as I walked to my first class with my best friend, who was Choctaw. As he turned to go into his class, which was across the hall from mine, I saw an Indian girl in a grey coat sitting in his class. I stopped him and asked him to find out her name. The next Wednesday I was heading into the same class when I saw my friend in the hall. He said, "I've got someone for you to meet." He then brings this girl out into the hall. YIPES! I'm super shy, and she was even worse. So we stood there together side by side with our backs against the wall, gazing at our shoes, and with red faces kind of talked in hushed whispers to our shoeslaces rather than to each other. It was awful, but a seed was planted. As I got more aquainted with people at school I came out of my shell more. I met a lot of girls. A LOT. My social life was great. I would see this girl, who by now had friends that I was well aquainted with, and I would tease her to get her to talk more. She would just smile and hide her face under all of her thick black hair. It was so cute considering that this girl was 5' 10'' and was on the college's basketball and softball teams. On the court and the field she was very aggressive. After a year of this and a couple of classes with her, my attraction to her grew, but I didn't think that she felt the same way. I thought it was great that she was Creek just like me. One rainy night I was sitting alone on the porch of the dorm when I saw two huddled figures approaching in the dark. One was short, the other tall. I knew that they were female from the hushed giggling, and that they were coming from the direction of the girl's dorm. I was just about to go in, when they reached the light of the porch. It was the girl and her friend. As the taller girl stood in the shadows with her hood covering her head, the shorter of the two said that she had something important that she needed to tell me. It seems that they had both been drinking, and the tall girl keep going on about how much that she liked me, but was too shy to ever tell me. Her friend decided to come with her, and tell me for her. So with this said the short girl left us alone. We talked and a date was set. We were sent off on our first date by a group of friends like it was our wedding. We ate, went to a movie, drove around, made out, and then as we were riding around, I asked her what clan she was. Deer. Deer Clan. Same as mine. I regained control of my pickup before we ran off the road. Nothing more was said about it that night. The next day I asked my Creek buddies if they would ever date a girl of the same clan. I got their typical guy answer that they always gave when a question concerned girls, "It depends on what she looks like." Surprisingly their answer sounded good to me. We continued to date for some time. We fell in love. She was a virgin. Here was her virginty like fresh, deep, and pure untrodden snow. I made snow angels in that virginity. I was very much in love with her. Everybody at school, professors, councilors, fellow students, etc. were estatic about our union. It was too damn storybook. I should have known what was about to happen. I bought an engagement ring. The same day my grandmother becomes very ill, and she is too critical for the small Indian hospital in Okemah to take care of, so she is transfered to a hospital in Tulsa. I'm not sure where the hospital is, but my girlfriend does since she is from Tulsa. So we go to the hospital. We park, and I turn off the truck. I turn to her and I bring out the ring, and I ask her to marry me. She screams yes then grabs me and starts crying. I'm so happy that I almost forgot why we were there. We go up to my grandma's room. Almost all of my family is there. I'm introducing my new fiance to everyone. I have this one older aunt who keeps looking at her. When I introduce them, my oldest aunt asks her if she knows so-and-so-and-so-and-so, which my girl answers yes to all of them. My aunt then turns to me and says, "They're your kinfolk too." OUCH. You see it seems that out of all of the Indian girls in school, I met, fell in love with, and got engaged to my "cousin" from my grandfather's side. My grandfather was a distant blood kin to her father. Oh, and don't forget our clans are the same from our mothers' side as well. Needless to say we never married. We did see each other for almost a year after that. We graduated together and transfered to the same university were we carried on for a while. We started to see different people, and I remember how weird it felt when one day I noticed a hickey that someone else had put on her neck. Eventually we went our seperate ways. My uncle told me that he sees her every now and then when she is in Okemah visiting her dad's family, and that she asks how I am doing. I saw her a little over a year ago. She had just had a little baby. 8:27 a.m. - 2001-12-23 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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