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Over the past decade, criminology in Australia, Canada and other settler colonies has increasingly engaged with activist challenges to the penal system. These anti-carceral engagements have been levelled at its laws, institutions and agents. Following a long history of criminology explicating and buttressing penal institutions, the criminological gaze slowly transitioned in the 1970s to a more critical lens, shifting focus from the people who are criminalised to the harms of the apparatus that criminalises. However, the focus remained steadfastly on institutions and dominant players – until much more recently. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the strength of activist organisations and grassroots movements in affecting change and shaping debates in relation to the penal system. This chapter will explore the role of activism in informing criminological scholarship during the pandemic period and how criminologists, in turn, have increasingly recognised the need to build alliances and collaborations with grassroots activists and engage in their own activism. The chapter focuses primarily on Australian and Canadian criminology and its growing imbrication with the prison abolition movement, especially in the shadow of ongoing colonial violence. It considers how activist scholars, including ourselves, attempt to build movements for structural change in the criminal system and beyond.

Purpose – Having concluded that the long-term and ongoing murders and disappearances of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA (MMIWG2S+) people is genocide, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (NIMMIWG) (2019) made 231 Calls for Justice in relation to culture, health, security, and criminal justice to broadly address the ongoing colonial dispossession and systemic, racialized, and gendered violence against MMIWG2S+ people. In response to these Calls for Justice, this article traces Indigenous grassroots initiatives to show the many ways that justice can be broadly conceived and mobilized to address the murders and disappearances.

Methodology/Approach – Drawing on the Unearthing Justices Resource Collection of 500+ Indigenous grassroots initiatives for the MMIWG2S+ people, this work theorizes a spatial approach to justice using mapping methodologies.

Findings – Not only have Indigenous families and communities been calling for justice, but they have also been cultivating justice across the land by building constellations of resource and support. The author traces the land-based activities specific to community patrols, land-based commemorations, search support, and walks and journeys to show the vast resources, skills, and strengths that already exist in Indigenous communities and how justice can be conceptualized within its local and spatial arrangements, and beyond the imaginaries of a criminal justice system.

Originality/Value – Where the ongoing colonial dispossession and systemic, racialized, and gendered violence against MMIWG2S+ people is well documented, there has been less consideration of how Indigenous families and communities have navigated a terrain where justice continues to be absent,elusive, or invasive.