This piece is not written about you.
It is written to you.
This is addressed to everyone across Southeast Asia, particularly to those who benefit from dominant historical narratives and feel unsettled when indigenous communities seek to reclaim histories that were marginalised, softened, or rewritten.
To you, who insist you are not racist, who genuinely believe in multiculturalism, who are proud of harmony and stability, yet feel unsettled when indigenous communities begin asking uncomfortable questions.
Why does it make you uneasy when history is revisited? Why does it bother you when economic imbalances are named? Why does reclaiming indigeneity feel like an accusation to you?
These are not rhetorical questions. They matter.
Because You Were Taught That Silence Equals Peace
Across Southeast Asia, many of you were raised to believe that questioning the past threatens the present. That revisiting history risks destabilising carefully constructed nations. That talking openly about indigeneity, land, and power is sensitive, divisive, or unproductive.
You were taught that silence was maturity.
So when indigenous groups speak, not with anger, but with clarity, it disrupts a deeply ingrained lesson: that good citizens do not ask too much, and grateful minorities do not ask at all.
But what you call peace has often been managed quiet.
Because History Was Sanitised for You
The version of history many of you inherited is clean. Linear. Convenient.
It celebrates trade, migration, merit, and modernisation, but often skips over displacement, dispossession, and the restructuring of indigenous societies to fit colonial and post-colonial needs. It tells you who built the economy, but not who paid the price for land reclassification, resource extraction, or development policies.
So when indigenous people question rewritten histories, it feels like an attack, not because it is false, but because it threatens the moral comfort of the story you were given.
If the past was messier than you were told, then present inequalities are not accidental. And that implication is what unsettles you.
Because Financial Power Was Normalised as Neutral
Many of you grew up believing that economic dominance was simply the result of hard work, good governance, or cultural values. You were taught to see wealth distribution as apolitical, something earned, not inherited or structured.
So when indigenous communities point out patterns, who owns land, who controls capital, who benefits most from development, it feels like resentment to you.
But naming imbalance is not envy. It is analysis.
Indigenous people are not asking why you have succeeded. They are asking why they were structurally excluded, and why that exclusion is still treated as historical baggage rather than present reality.
Because Indigeneity Was Reduced to Culture, Not Power
You are comfortable with indigeneity as performance.
Traditional dress. Ceremonial dances. Festivals. Tourism brochures.
But when indigeneity moves from aesthetics to politics, from costume to claims, from heritage to rights, discomfort sets in.
Because indigeneity that asks nothing of you is safe. Indigeneity that questions land, representation, and economic justice is not.
You were never meant to confront indigenous people as contemporaries with unresolved grievances. Only as symbols of a past already settled.
Because You Mistake Discomfort for Harm
Here is the most important distinction you may not have been taught:
Discomfort is an emotional reaction. Injustice is a structural condition.
When indigenous people speak, you feel unsettled, and you confuse that feeling with being attacked. So you call their questions divisive, racial, or dangerous.
But discomfort is not discrimination.
Being asked to listen is not oppression. Being asked to reflect is not loss.
If your sense of belonging depends on others staying silent, then what you are defending is not harmony. It is hierarchy.
This Is Not a Rejection of Coexistence
Indigenous people across Southeast Asia are not asking for supremacy. They are not demanding exclusion. They are not rejecting shared futures.
They are asking for honesty.
Honesty about how nations were built. Honesty about whose histories were prioritised. Honesty about why some communities remain economically marginalised despite generations of progress.
And honesty requires discomfort.
If You Feel Defensive, Sit With That
This is not a call for guilt. It is a call for responsibility.
If indigenous voices make you uncomfortable, pause before dismissing them. Ask what part of your worldview is being challenged. Ask what assumptions are being unsettled. Ask why you were taught that harmony requires others to speak less, not that you listen more.
Because a region that prides itself on diversity cannot survive on selective memory.
And a Southeast Asia that refuses to interrogate power will continue reproducing the very inequalities it insists are behind us.
So if this conversation makes you uncomfortable, do not ask why indigenous people are speaking.
Ask why you were never prepared to hear them.
The Indigenous Narrative 