Molly Swain is Métis, born and raised in otôskwanihk (Calgary), currently living in amiskwacîwâskihikan (Edmonton). She is a public educator, academic, podcaster, organizer, speaker, and writer. She is also currently a PhD student researching 20th century Métis history and radical politics.
Molly is a founding member of Free Lands Free Peoples, an Indigenous-led anti-colonial prairie penal abolition group. She is the co-host, along with Chelsea Vowel, of otipêyimisiw-iskwêwak kihci-kîsikohk Métis in Space, a Canadian Podcast Award-winning Indigenous feminist science fiction podcast and Land Back Project (Back 2 The Land: 2Land 2Furious). Molly has also been involved in academic labour organizing for over a decade at McGill University and the University of Alberta.
Molly’s work has appeared in Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canada, Canadian Art Magazine, Briarpatch Magazine, Active History, and This is F*cking Class War: Voices from the 2012 Québec Student Strike, among other publications. She has been featured in Vanity Fair, Chatelaine, CBC, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Bitch Magazine, Canadian Dimension Magazine, THIS Magazine, and more.
Molly’s areas of knowledge include Indigenous futurisms and prefigurative praxis (especially through direct action and creative expression), relationality and living together beyond limited paradigms of reconciliation, decolonization, Métis politics and history, other-than-human relations, anarchism and radical politics, podcasting, student labour organizing, Land Back and land rematriation, and penal (police, prisons, and their concomitant carceral structures) abolitionism. She can also wax poetic about karaoke, Dolly Parton, and Star Trek.
To book Molly Swain, contact Rob Firing at speakers@transatlanticagency.com.