Category: the indigenous narrative
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Why We Tell These Stories: A Return to Semangat
Across Southeast Asia, stories are everywhere. They move through our phones, our televisions, our conversations, and our timelines at a relentless pace. News breaks, trends rise and fall, narratives are packaged and repackaged for easy consumption. Yet for all this movement, something essential remains largely unmoved. Beneath the surface of mainstream media coverage across the…
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From Wax and Cloth to World Culture: The Origins and Global Influence of Batik
In recent years, batik has become visually synonymous with Peranakan culture. It appears in exhibitions, home décor, fashion editorials, and heritage narratives, often framed as a hallmark of Straits Chinese identity. This visibility has brought batik renewed attention, but it has also quietly shifted the centre of gravity of its story. The deeper origins of…
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Breaking Malay Stereotypes: From Punchlines to Self-Knowledge
The Normalisation of Stereotypes Malay stereotypes have existed for so long that they have begun to feel ordinary. Words such as lazy, backward, overly sensitive, or kampung-minded are repeated so casually that they are often disguised as jokes. They are softened with laughter and dismissed as harmless humour. At times, even Malays repeat these stereotypes…
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If This Makes You Uncomfortable, You Should Ask Yourself Why
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…
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Not Racist, Just Indigenous: Why We Should No Longer Stay Silent
In Southeast Asia, silence is often mistaken for harmony. We are taught that keeping quiet preserves social cohesion, that raising difficult truths risks destabilising multicultural societies, and that speaking too plainly about history or power makes one divisive. In countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, silence is frequently framed as the price of peace. But…
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The Disappearance of Kampong Spirit and the Cost of Development in Singapore
Singapore frequently calls for a revival of the kampong spirit. Political speeches, national campaigns, and school values programmes describe it as neighbourliness, mutual care, and shared responsibility. The term is treated as a moral ideal that modern society must rediscover. What is rarely acknowledged is a more uncomfortable truth. Kampong spirit did not disappear on…
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Bumiputera Privileges: Why They Are Justified and Should Not be Challenged
In Southeast Asia, the question of indigenous rights and privileges often arises in public discourse, particularly in multi-ethnic nations such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and Singapore. Indigenous or native communities, including the Malays in Malaysia and Singapore, the Brunei Malays, and various native groups in Indonesia, have historically been granted special rights, protections, and access…
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Rooted and Unapologetic: Embracing Indigenous Pride in Southeast Asia
Indigenous identity in Southeast Asia has been historically devalued, leading many native people to suppress who they are. Pride must endure even when it is questioned, mocked, or dismissed by more economically affluent migrant communities. According to UNESCO, indigenous peoples across the Asia-Pacific region have faced sustained cultural marginalisation that pressures them to abandon language,…
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Southeast Asia’s Hidden Hierarchy: Indigenous Disadvantage, Chinese Dominance
Walk through the skyscraper-filled skylines of Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Jakarta, Bangkok, or Ho Chi Minh City, and a pattern emerges that is almost too obvious to mention. The banks, conglomerates, ports, plantations, and industrial empires are disproportionately controlled by ethnic Chinese families, often long-settled, naturalised citizens who dominate sectors that shape national economies. Meanwhile, the…
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The Racism Behind “Jungle Asian”
The slur “jungle Asian” is often brushed off as crude humour, a throwaway insult not worth engaging with. But language like this does not emerge accidentally. It exposes a hierarchy that has quietly taken hold within Asian communities themselves, one that elevates East Asians while positioning Southeast Asians as something less developed, less refined, less…
The Indigenous Narrative 