Beyond Entrepreneurship: The Iu Mien’s Silver Craft Activism in Thailand

This chapter argues that Indigenous entrepreneurship can be viewed as a decolonial practice undertaken by Indigenous peoples to contest discrimination and other forms of oppression. This proposition is grounded in this research that concerns the activism of the Southeast Asian Indigenous group of the Iu Mien or Yao, who utilise their family-owned silver crafts businesses as a gentle form of struggle against official Thai hegemonic discourses, as well as to support their livelihoods. These Indigenous entrepreneurs are not merely economic agents accumulating wealth, but also “craftivist” entrepreneurs who combine their traditional craftsmanship expertise with capitalist objectives such as capital accumulation, market competition, and private property to empower themselves and reshape their collective identity to contest the state’s hegemonic discourse that continues to marginalise them today. The study draws on extensive fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2023, which involved semi-structured interviews and participant observation throughout the course of the fieldwork.