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Paper short abstract

Hmong in Alaska craft belonging after migration through subsistence practices such as gardening, gathering, and animal procurement that support meals, ritual, and healing. These practices shape felt life by linking body, land, and kinship, making displacement livable and morally meaningful.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how migration is lived through everyday subsistence practices among Hmong families in Anchorage, Alaska. Focusing on gardening, gathering, animal procurement, herbal healing, and ritual, it shows how belonging is made through embodied labor rather than symbolic identification alone.

Hmong migration to the United States followed war, flight, and resettlement. In Anchorage, many families cultivate gardens, gather wild plants, raise animals for ritual, and circulate food and medicine through kin networks. These activities are rarely oriented toward economic survival. Instead, they are described as ways of “feeling right,” staying healthy, and maintaining balance between people, spirits, and land.

Sensory distinctions between store-bought and garden-grown food, between sedentary and physically engaged life, and between lifeless and living environments shape how migrants evaluate place and well-being. Through smell, taste, touch, and labor, migrants remake unfamiliar environments into morally resonant places.

I argue that subsistence functions as an affective infrastructure of belonging. Felt life is not simply an internal response to migration but is produced through material practices that connect bodies to landscapes, memories, and relationships. Gardening, healing, and ritual allow migrants to experience continuity with ancestral worlds while adapting to new ecological and economic conditions.

Attention to these embodied practices shows how migration is not only movement across space but an ongoing project of making life livable, meaningful, and relational within conditions shaped by displacement, inequality, and shifting family roles.