Chapter 2
As Juniper dropped three seeds into a small hole she’d tilled in the backyard garden behind the trailer she shared with her mother, she said a prayer over the location of future new growth.
She looked to the sky and said a small prayer for herself.
This one, though still short, was more optimistic than any of the hushed, half-assed ones she’d uttered out over the last decade and a half of her life.
Please, Creator, let this be it.
She felt as if her life was constantly on the edge of some form of trajectory-altering change, constantly pushing forward to be held back at the last second.
It was like living in her own time loop she was destined to repeat.
In this loop, she spent every day reliving the time she got her three younger siblings ready to go out in the snow as a kid, plastic bags over mismatched socks to keep feet dry, tucked into whatever boots she could find, only to get to the sloped hill to see all the other kids in front of her had been able to slide down the hill so many times already the snow was melted.
She’d lived in that forward-backward, almost-but not quite motion, her whole life it seemed.
Sometimes she’d get far enough ahead she could see the life she’d imagined.
Sometimes she wondered if living in ignorance was actually better.
If you never got a chance to see what could be, if you never dared to dream large enough, you couldn’t grieve what you didn’t have.
Could you grieve over something that was never really yours to begin with?
She kicked off her short gardening boots by the back door, slid her heels on, and pushed her long hair back over her shoulders as she stood up.
She smoothed the lavender sheath dress she bought for her big first day over the curves of her hips.
Purple was her power color, and it matched the purple and white wampum shell bracelet she never took off.
She took one final look in the mirror by the front door.
Not bad, Banks. You clean up well for a girl who’s always in the dirt.
Finally, she picked up the to-go mug of coffee she’d prepared earlier for Gloria and her own to-go mug with a splash of oat milk her mother still teased her about.
How do you milk an oat, Junie?
On cue, she mouthed the words as her mother said them. She made sure her back was turned before she added an eye roll.
It seemed more natural to milk an oat in the ways her people used to milk walnuts, but she had stopped having that argument a while ago.
It’s not like cows were indigenous to this place either.
At least oat milk didn’t give every lactose intolerant Native she knew heinous gas the way too much milk and cheese did.
She used her hip to bump open the front screen door that no longer latched properly and made her way to the old Mazda in the gravel driveway.
Lost in her thoughts, Juniper pulled into the parking lot of the Tribe’s large, central administrative building.
This building was a recent development and had replaced the multiple administrative office trailers that originally sat on the land.
She remembered beaming with pride at the ribbon cutting ceremony last summer.
It was evidence of what her community could do when they came together, united in their purpose.
Ever since, she’d had her eyes set on finally getting her program up and running and having it find a home within these walls.
As Juniper climbed the expansive front steps, her body buzzed with energy.
She stopped by the front desk of the building.
“Good morning!” She smiled brightly, as she greeted and handed over the mug of coffee to the very cheerful administrative assistant, Gloria.
“Morning, Junie. You are too kind, my dear.” She took a long sip of her coffee and grinned. “I wish I could bottle up some of that glow about you for myself.”
Juniper splayed out both hands on the tall desk counter in front of her and leaned forward.
“Auntie, I’ve been waiting for this day for so long. I couldn’t be more ready.”
Gloria smiled at her and set her coffee down.
“I know you hate being called resilient, but you have weathered quite a bit of storms to get to this point. I’ve admired watching you keep going.
It’s been the highlight of these last few years for me.
Here, I wanted to give you something.” Gloria reached into her oversized purse and pulled out a small gift bag.
She handed it to Juniper. “Just a little something from me.”
Juniper pulled out the tissue paper from the top of the gift bag, and then held up a lanyard with rows of colorful beads sewn around it in various patterns.
“For your official new ID badge,” Gloria added while lifting up the ID badge she had strung on the beaded lanyard around her own neck. She handed over Juniper’s new badge to go with it.
“Auntie!” Juniper indulged in a squeal as she pulled the lanyard over her head and clipped on the badge. “Now I get to be all official like you.”
“I asked another niece to bead it with the colors of the three sisters, since you were the one who taught me that story and how to plant. I thought that might be special, all things considered Ms. Runapewak Traditional Foods.”
Juniper looked down at the swirls of yellow, orange, green, tan, and brown ascending the lanyard in the way that corn, beans, and squash work together to help each other grow upward.
Their community held the story of the three sisters — their most important agricultural staples and cultural foodway.
The story goes that the oldest sister was corn who grew tall and strong to support the development of her two younger sisters.
The middle sister was bean, who coiled up the corn stalk to be near her older sister and added nitrogen to the soil.
And the youngest was squash, who lay at the feet of her older sisters, cooled the soil, and kept the weeds away.
When the sisters were planted together, they nurtured each other like family.
Juniper also thought of her community in a similar way — everyone had a role to play in its protection and in its cultivation.
Gloria had played such a significant role in that way for her, whether through advocating for Juniper’s traditional foods program to officially be brought under the Tribe’s administration or for her ability to live openly as a queer woman in a community that hadn’t always been accepting, and in many ways, still had work to do.
Juniper couldn’t really put into words how much that meant to her in that moment. She was so full of happiness and hope she felt like she could burst.
“Let me know if you need anything, dear. I take lunch between 12 and 1, but I’ll be here otherwise.”
“I will,” Juniper responded before squeezing Gloria’s hand and heading to the stairwell.
“Oh, one more thing –”
Juniper looked back and laughed at the alarming way Gloria’s eyes doubled in size in excitement. She mirrored the same look back at her.
“Someone else started today. She looked about your age. Real cute too. She looks like your type.”
“My type?” Juniper laughed again. “Auntie, how do you know my type?”
Gloria’s face twisted up in a sneer. “We all remember Jess.”
Unfortunately, no one would ever let Juniper forget Jess, her last major relationship with a woman who she found out was an actual, certifiably awful person.
Past the breakup, it had dragged on in some kind of a situationship for months where under the completely untrue and fabricated guise of I’m just using her to get what I want I swear, Juniper just couldn’t fully let her go.
Juniper rolled her hands around in the air to encourage Gloria to get to the point – or at least get past the mention of her.
In return, Gloria waved a wagging hand down her own body as she curved side to side. “This woman had that edge you like.”
Juniper’s eyebrows creased together from a combination of laughter and cringe. “What kind of edge?”
“I don’t know, Junie! Don’t try to catch me saying something I’m not supposed to! She had on a button down shirt and fancy shoes that looked like they came from the men’s section, looking all smart and mysterious. Nice hands – I remember you saying something about that. Okay? Or was it forearms.”
“Okay, yeah. All of that,” Juniper conceded.
Gloria was not wrong about her type. Juniper already had the wheels turning on how to craft a “coincidental” run-in with the new woman.
“Okay, okay. Is she Runapewak?”
“I don’t know. I just know she asked me for directions to Theo Tyler’s office.” Gloria shuffled some things around on the top of her desk. “I don’t have a badge for her yet, or I’d tell you her name. Bet we still need to get her picture for it.”
“Hmm. Thanks for the intel. I’ll report back.”
Juniper pursed her lips and cast a devious sideways glance at Gloria. Gloria rested her arms on the desk, set her chin in her palms, and winked. Juniper dramatically slid her arms across the top of the desk as she sidestepped away, and they giggled together at the squeak of skin across laminate.
“Don’t forget to invite me to the wedding,” Gloria called out after Juniper rounded the corner to the staircase.
“Aye, I planned on you being my flower girl.”
Juniper took the stairs to the second floor and ran her fingers down the wall as she approached her program’s office.
She wouldn’t have an office to herself — she didn’t want to work that way anyway — but she would have a good size room with lots of space to collaborate with other employees or community members with a large storage room off to the side that would eventually house storage cabinets for seed preservation and collection.