This evening's meeting

 I'm a member of the local AAUW branch. Have been for years. One of the meetings I suggested for this year was getting a speaker of one of the Native languages in the area (we are almost an overlap between the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations) and the president was like "well, you know people on campus, see if they can find someone"

It took some doing. And the person I contacted (someone who sponsors a Native American group) was busy and had a little difficulty finding someone who would be free. So in the meantime, we had had the previous meeting of the group, and several members wanted to go to a performance on campus, and we had talked about just doing a short business meeting.

Well, then the next day the person I had e-mailed got back to me: she had a student who was very enthusiastic about wanting to present to us about women in Choctaw culture and I felt bad about the suggestion to cancel the speaker (and I wanted to see the talk) so I had them proceed.

Well, it turned out the speaker came early, it's possible I had sent a message saying "hey some people want to go to a performance, can you come a half hour earlier," and the members who planned to be present were there (the person who arranges times had called everyone)

As it turned out, one of the people who had wanted that had to care for an ill family member, so anyway.

But I'm glad I didn't cancel. For one thing, it was one of the university's students, and it's nice she can add this to her resume. But more importantly, it was a very interesting talk. I like this kind of "teach me something I don't already know" things. I didn't know about the language (interesting fact, Choctaw has at least two ways of forming possessives - one for "things outside of you" (in the sense of not-being-intrinsic) and "things intrinsic to you" (like emotions). According to the speaker, female relatives - the Choctaw people are a matrilineal society and women were traditionally very important "behind the scenes" power* - get the "intrinsic" possessive (so "my grandmother" is formed differently to "my grandfather"). Male relatives get the "not-intrinsic" possessive form. 

(*Apparently the men, who basically made up the government, would go home after a day of meeting/consultation over things like land disputes, and talk it over with their wives and/or mothers, and very often the decisions made were what the women - especially older women - recommended).

She also commented that "women were seen as wiser and less impulsive than men" and yeah, heh.

I had known about using competition rather than true warring to solve things like border conflicts; apparently stickball (which is somewhat related to lacrosse in how it's played) was often used, where the winners were the ones who got to settle the boundaries as they wanted. 

 She also talked about being proud of her culture and proud to be a Choctaw woman and that's good. It's nice to see it when people are proud, in a positive way, of their culture and want to learn more about it and be a good ambassador for it. She wore a traditional "fancy dress" (the long, ruffled skirt and top with a diamond design, and the apron over it.). 

At the very end she had some "cultural questions" and there were *prizes* if you were the first to answer correctly. I wasn't fast enough on the one about the "three sisters" crops (lots of people know that one, I also talk about it in my classes as an example of using a polyculture/mixed planting to avoid some of the problems with a monoculture and also keep the soil healthy). But I got one of them! She asked what it signified when a woman wore her dress back-to-front, given that they fit mostly the same way forward and backward, the difference being the zipper is ordinarily in the back. (it was multiple choice, I think one of the choices was "it's just easier to put on," and another one was "at funerals, to honor the ones who went before us" but I guessed the third because it seemed too practical not to be correct: "easy access when you're breastfeeding a baby" and that was right)

I won a small print of a dancer (I think he is supposed to be a dancer, maybe he's a stickball player, I haven't taken a close look at it yet) done by a well-known area artist. Which is really pretty nice and I might get it framed the next time I have a good Michael's coupon, and put it up somewhere. 

I admit I wasn't super enthusiastic going out again when I got home from school; I was tired. But I'm glad I went, it was really interesting and it was also enjoyable.