ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to offer an analysis of powered “relational” and gendered place making and constructions of nativeness among the Hmong/Miao through the lens of their burgeoning media practices. In comparing Hmong, as they are called in Southeast Asia and the West, with Miao, as they are called in China, one sees a predictable intensification of narratives of displacement and exile the further one gets from China. The theme of Hmong as interlopers on already occupied lands took a strange and terrible historical twist in the fall of 2004 when a Hmong American man, Chai Soua Vang, shot and killed six hunters in the woods of Wisconsin. In the case of diasporic media, they comprise media commodities that sell in the West; in the case of indigenous movements, they are in large part what generates the flow of donor funds.
