Anti-Colonial Abolition and Creative Expression: Worlding the Abolitionist Now

This interactive workshop will introduce participants to the idea of anti-colonial penal abolition and its connections to creative expression as a tactic of “imagining otherwise.” An anti-colonial abolitionist lens foregrounds and illuminates how the prison system supports settler colonialism and obscures Indigenous justice traditions. Abolitionist creative expression, through music, movement, writing, art, and more, acts as a means to imagine and move into worlds without and beyond prisons, policing, and colonialism.

Free Lands Free Peoples is an Indigenous-led anti-colonial penal abolitionism group based in amiskwaciwâskahikan, Treaty Six and Métis territory. We do popular education and solidarity work in an often hostile socio-political context, inside and outside prison.