Father

If a woman is certain which boy gave her the baby, and he is still alive when it is born, he will receive the same recognition of adulthood that she does. He undergoes an adapted form of the woman ceremony and is given the rank of adulthood and the title of father. (Because their language long ago lost the words for "man" and "father", the words used are the same as "woman" and "mother" but with a suffix.)

The women's nomadic ancestors acknowledged and valued both parents. As the former nomads transitioned to sedentism, they became matrilocal. Women would stay in the home where they grew up, and a man would move into his wife's house.   When the first villages were settled along the river and needed to send and receive resources, men far more often than women were the couriers. At the same time, these villages happened to be in areas where lump-nuts grew. The combination of factors grew into an increasingly widespread belief that the nuts, not the men, were the cause.   The irony is that at that time they were still using a nomadic word for "father", often using it as a synonym for "man". With the change in belief women no longer distinguished between young boys and mature men, so the word "father" came to mean a male person of any age.

The acknowledgement of fatherhood is only the start of the transformation of river culture into vastland culture. Rules about fidelity in relationships arise, to remove doubt about the identity of a child's father. A new tradition begins of carrying both maternal and paternal names, called "bloodline" and "fleshline".