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This chapter brings to the forefront various challenges of engaging in both critical and participatory forms of knowledge building, in particular with queer and trans migrants with precarious status. Two scholars trace their previous experiences of engaging in participatory and critical research as well as their shift toward reflexive ways of knowing. This shift elicits the ways in which Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) may be used to build reflexive knowledge with and about queer and trans migrant communities, and in particular, LGBTQ refugees and MSM Latino migrants.

Indigenous and racialized people have suffered multifaceted dispossession as a result of ongoing and historical violence by the Canadian state. Most greatly affected are Indigenous gender-queer and nonbinary people, who have been erased by law and policy and are targets of violence; Indigenous women, who are targeted by gender discrimination and violence; and Indigenous children, who continue to be removed from their communities. Nonwhite or racialized migrants to Canada are victims of the same colonial project, which relies on the slavery of Black and Brown bodies and Orientalist constructions that portray the West as “superior” in relation to the “barbaric” East. This dispossession, oppression, and violence are met by a constellation of local and global approaches to resist, heal, and create Fearless futures for Indigenous and racialized people.

Through collaborative storytelling, this chapter centers a radical project focused on resistance to gender violence, reconnection to land and body, Indigenous and settler solidarity, storytelling and witnessing, and healing through art. These efforts, including multiple community workshops and mural projects with Indigenous and racialized women, as well as queer and two-spirit people and youth, have recentered Indigenous healing and medicine, promoted intergenerational teachings, fostered intercommunity relationship building and solidarities through stories and witnessing, reconnected disconnected Indigenous peoples (both local and settler) to their bodies, lands, and communities, and unsettled colonial mentalities on gender and Indigeneity publicly and privately. This project was a collaboration between The Fearless Collective, based in South Asia, the Innovative Young Indigenous Leaders Symposium, based in British Columbia, Canada, and research from the School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, British Columbia.

This study challenges contentions that rights are limiting through an analysis of grassroots rights talk in the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer) community in the 1980s. I argue that rights talk can be an important source of constructing community within local, nonmainstream, noninstitutional spaces through a discourse analysis of a forum for LGBTQ community-building in the past: the letters to the editor columns in Gay Community News. This study enhances law and social movement scholarship on the role of rights in social movements by exploring how rights discourse is employed by everyday people in a noninstitutional community-building venue rarely addressed in contemporary research.