Abstract: Marx’s theory of alienation posits that under capitalism, when labor is no longer directed to meet immediate needs but belongs to a master, then producers are estranged from their labor. Marx’s humanist theory is ever more relevant today when a new wave of subsistence producers, a majority of them Indigenous peoples, are being dispossessed from their lands, cut off from subsistence production and forced to migrate for work. In Marx’s view, rural subsistence producers would disappear into the class of an urban proletariat, as the main agent for change. In this article, I rethink the concept by exploring the role played by three non-alienated activities in opening a terrain of struggle under capitalism. Subsistence production has not disappeared, but coexists with two other kinds of unalienated activity among Indigenous migrant workers: social labor and creative practice. Unalienated labor is a space to contest capitalist labor relations, a stage for rehearsing ways of being for alternative futures.