Jessika Hepburn
Community organizer & Entrepreneur
The Biscuit Eater Website / The Biscuit Eater Facebook / The Biscuit Eater Instagram / Maritime Makers Website / Maritime Makers Facebook / Maritime Makers Instagram / OhMyHandmade / BIPOC South Shore Facebook / BIPOC South Shore Instagram
I am a community organizer and entrepreneur of Black & Jewish descent based in Mi’kma’ki working to craft a culture of care and decolonization, abolish white supremacy, redistribute wealth, and replace capitalism/colonialism with community goodness.
These days you can usually find me feeding people, caring for my community, serving up radical books and biscuits with a warm welcome at The Biscuit Eater Cafe & Books a rural cafe and Black led bookstore I co-own in Mahone Bay, Nova scotia. I am also honoured to be secretary for SEED (South End Environmental Injustice Society) a society based in Shelburne, Nova Scotia started by Louise Delisle and featured in the documentary “There’s Something In The Water” based on the book of the same name by Dr Ingrid Waldron. SEED is dedicated to ending environmental racism, ensuring access to clean water, and reparations for Black residents of South End Shelburne, home of the oldest free Black community in North America and location of the first race riots.
In 2020 with a collective of Black, Indigenous and people of colour I started organizing #BlackToBirchtown with the plan to create a retreat and learning centre in Birchtown where Black, Indigenous, people of colour and 2SLGBTQ+ communities can rest, heal + work together for Black liberation & Indigenous sovereignty. We are in the process of purchasing a property and starting retreats for our communities the summer of 2021.
You can also find me organizing support, events, and advocacy with BIPOC South Shore; stepping up as the only candidate of Black descent or woman of colour for any party in Nova Scotia during the 43rd federal election in 2019 for the riding of South Shore — St Margarets; organizing creative economies with Maritime Makers and Oh My! Handmade; holding governments of a levels, leaders, and companies like Etsy accountable to ethics, human rights, and being anti-racist; questioning everything while writing and reading as if my life depends on words (it does); and imagining radical rest, the kind of rest we will have when all of us are permitted the luxury of staying home, with someplace to come home to, food in our bellies, security in our communities and the utter abolition of racism, white supremacy, and oppression in every form.
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What are you most proud of professionally? And who or why?
Years and years ago I was a preschool teacher in British Columbia and had a Korean student named Narae who was so quiet and withdrawn. My co-teacher was racist and insisted to me during a meeting that Narae was ‘not very bright’ or worth engaging. This is how we fail children and each other. Furious I spent extra time making sure Narae felt included and it was obvious they were not only bright but brilliant, fully bi-lingual in English and Korean, able to write and read in both languages at 5 years old. All they needed was a little love and support. I keep tabs on all my kids and know that she graduated top of her class in junior high, high school, was on the Dean’s Honour List and won a scholars award with an average of 95% or higher in university.
My teaching contract was not renewed after that year for trying to address the issues with my older co-teacher. I was 19 and full of belief that if I cared enough everyone else would too, losing the job stung, but I got the best gift of my career from Narae’s parents when she graduated from preschool, this note:
“Dear Jessika,
Your affection has been a stepping stone for Narae to stand up for herself. My wife and I really appreciate your love.”
The work I am proudest of is being a stepping stone so others can stand up for themselves.
What’s your vision for Atlantic Canada in 10 years? What’s our biggest opportunity now?
2020 was a year of reckoning. Many people learned how rapidly life can change globally and how quickly the undercurrent of both domestic and racial violence in Atlantic Canada can surface to threaten our communities. In ten years it will be 2031, a terrifying concept that is also full of potential for imagining new futures together. Instead of a future and present with rising fear and uncertainty, where our systems are racist and in constant crisis from lack of support or care so there is never enough housing, food, daycare, employment, education or opportunity we can imagine something different and act together to make it real and take good care of each other.
Imagine Mi’kma’ki as a region where we honour our obligations to each other and the land as treaty people with respect and reverence, putting Indigenous communities who have been here since time immemorial and Black, Queer liberation at the centre of all that we do. What could that future look like? I want to live there.
What’s your favourite or most read book or podcast? Now or at each of your greatest stages of growth?
I own a bookstore, this is a painful question, like asking which of our kids is my favourite (all of them for different reasons)! Instead I’ll share some of what I read in January 2021 + a Black Future Month reading list. You can also follow my adventures in reading by visiting The Biscuit Eater and browsing our bookshelves!
Noopiming The Cure for White Ladies, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Elatsoe, Darcie Little Badger
Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, edited by Joshua Whitehead
“In nêhiyâwewin we have the word “nîkânihk” for “in the future,” and within that word is “nikânah,” or “put her/him in front.” Here, in this anthology, we have done just that: we have put Two-Spiritedness in the front, for once, and in that leading position we will walk into the future, in whatever form that may take, hand in hand, strong, resilient, extraneously queer, and singing a round-dance song that calls us all back in together. I bring forward this short, concise history in order to say: we have lived in torture chambers, we have excelled under the weight of killing machinations, we’ve hardened into bedrock, but see how our bodies dazzle in the light.”
- Joshua Whitehead, introduction to Love After the End
I Place You into the Fire, Rebecca Thomas
The Death of Vivek Oji, Akwaeke Emezi
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know, Samira Ahmed
“History doesn’t need to be an exclusionary tale. Our lives and worlds are richer for the diversity inclusion brings. The present always holds the power to write history. Let’s write the truth. There is room enough on our shelves, and if you find you’ve run out of space, construct a new bookcase. Build another library. Dig deep to reveal the wrongs of the past, so we can write this world as it should be. So we can right this world. Period. #writeherstory” Samira Ahmed, author’s note “Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know”
Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi
The Cafe and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls, Anissa Gray
Love After Love, Ingrid Persaud
Also in honour of Black History/Future Month here are 10 important Black books I strongly recommend reading (ps: we have almost all of these in stock at the cafe)
How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?, N.K. Jemisin
Annaka, Andre Fenton
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, Charlene Carruthers
Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present, Robyn Maynard
The Skin We're In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power, Desmond Cole
Frying Plantain, Zalika Reid-Benta
The Nova Scotia Black Experience, Bridglal Pachai
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Audre Lorde
If I Can Cook/You Know God Can: African American Food Memories, Meditations, and Recipes, Ntozake Shange
Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, Tessa McWatt
What’s your deepest learning from this past year? How did/will you apply it?
“Without community there is no liberation” - Audre Lorde
This teaching from “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” is one that deepens every year. As a community organizer who has dedicated my life, love, and resources to community care I know that the answer to every question is community. But like Audre Lorde also pointed out “community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.”
In 2021 our #BuyBlackBirchtown campaign is purchasing almost 8 acres of land and two houses to develop a cooperatively owned retreat centre. We are making a place for community where those of us who are different and outside the definition of acceptable can rest, resist and organize for our liberation.
What were your priorities and how did they help you overcome some of the struggles you’ve faced? What motivated you to make the choices you’ve made?
My life has not always been successful from the outside. I was an only child of a Black single mother with no real family or financial support and was sexually abused by my father as a toddler. My mom worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with some of Canada’s most vulnerable residents, the kids I loved were children of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, my first marches were demanding an inquiry into the disappearance of women and trans people in our neighbourhood. Determined to imagine better I was more interested in watching municipal elections than cartoons as a kid and I wanted to become Prime Minister. Instead of playing I was writing long letters to local politicians demanding they take better care of the planet and people. At nine years old I sat on my first board of directors and have served hundreds of organizations and communities since. At 13 I wrote a song and performed it on CBC Radio about how when I grew up to become Prime Minister I would administer help to all the people and then one day, eventually, I planned to bring the whole system crashing down around me.
After the suicide of my beloved aunt Lizzie in 1994 my mom packed us up and moved to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island where we started all over again. All the trauma left me forgetting about wanting to be Prime Minister and I quit school, moved out early, battled an abusive relationship and drug use while working long hours as a server and baker before eventually hauling myself up at 18 by working with children as an early childhood educator and dedicating my life to community care. I want to leave a legacy as a good ancestor and be a safe person that my community and family can turn to for the support I needed, that we all need.
How have you recovered from fractured professional relationships? What uncomfortable truths have you learned about yourself in those experiences?
People and organizations, specifically white led ones, will love folks like me for being outspoken, direct, and holding power accountable until that same accountability is turned towards them. Whether it was organizing a global consumer strike to hold Etsy accountable after a hostile shareholder takeover gutted the company of it’s B-corp status and social mandate or holding both the federal and provincial NDP accountable for my oppressive experience as a racialized candidate I have chosen again and again to risk personal security for my integrity. Prioritizing ethics over expedience has fractured many relationships costing contracts, financial and professional opportunities but has also shown people that I cannot be bought or manipulated. For every surface relationship lost a deeper solidarity and support has grown. I will never forget how one boss said to me years ago “oh Jessika, your ethics make your life so much harder”, she was right and it is still oh so worth it.
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Community Caretaker, Biscuit Baker, Movement Maker, Advocate, Agitator, Ancestor in training