Alongside jade, gold, and timber, the Myanmar Himalaya is a well-known source of herbal medicines for Chinese markets. Medicinal commodities, like other resources, have continued to flow across the border for decades despite ongoing civil war and rapid deforestation. However, unlike logging and jade enterprises, the medicine trade endures as an indigenous resource economy—one in which production is not only carried out by regional indigenous communities, but one that many indigenous communities depend upon for their livelihoods. This dissertation documents how the medicine trade persists in this volatile frontier, examining how Lisu and other indigenous communities reappropriate two common tools of frontier life to sustain the trade: herbal medicines and mass-produced 125cc motorcycles. This dissertation makes three key arguments: First, herbal medicine is not simply a commodity, but a means of production in resource extraction frontiers like the Myanmar Himalaya. It serves as a critical tool to keep workers laboring in physically demanding and politically unstable environments. Tracing the close relationships that frontier laborers develop with medicinal plants during their work. This entails everything from using herbs to cope with malaria and broken bones while mining, to experimentally cultivating valuable drugs to secure income and healthcare resources. At the same time, the dissertation documents how Lisu workers often use their knowledge of herbal medicines assume the role of “barefoot doctors” in this frontier. In this too, medicine is a means of production, one that allows Lisu to carry out sustained labor in the social space of a war zone where negotiating predation is an everyday part of working life. Second, more than commodities in circulation, motorcycles are critical means of circulation in resource extraction frontiers, enabling a steady flow of products out of the region amidst displacement and resource exhaustion. They do so by moving commodities, workers, and even living plants across shifting sites of production and habitation. Here the dissertation, tracks how displaced Lisu living in sub-urban settlements use motorcycles to collect traditional medicines, tend shifting agricultural fields, and participate in resource extraction work by commuting long-distance. At the same time, it uncovers how these vehicles are enabling a new proliferation of medicinal species as workers use motorcycles to transplant valuable species from rainforests into sub/urban gardens and groves, creating new pathways of biodiversity and healthcare resources. Finally, considering the use of herbal medicine and motorcycles together, the dissertation argues that these tools-cum-commodities are part of an indigenous strategy of production—or what Neville and Coulthard (2019) have called an “indigenous political economy.” More than allowing a steady flow of commodities and the accumulation of profits, the dissertation documents how this strategy accumulates biodiversity, healthcare resources, and business opportunities for indigenous communities. It compares the use of herbal medicines and motorcycle in the economy to another indigenous economic strategy: militarized checkpoints that levy trade and control resource extraction. In conclusion, it considers how these strategies travel with displaced and migrant indigenous communities in the region, and how they are used to refashion new settlements, livelihoods, and environments in new homelands.