Tag: the indigenous narrative
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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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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…
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Renaming Food Is Not Branding. It Is Erasure.
It happens quietly, almost imperceptibly at first. You walk into a café and see nasi lemak reintroduced as a “Nanyang Coconut Rice Set.” A packet of rendang is described as “Peranakan Braised Beef.” A bowl of laksa that follows Malay techniques and ingredients is marketed as “Nyonya Laksa.” Even traditional desserts like putri salat, kuih…
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Inside the Hidden World of Magic in the Malay Culture
For all its modernisation, the Malay world still carries an undercurrent rarely captured in policy papers or tourism brochures, a complex belief system magic. Far from fringe superstition, these practices are deeply rooted in Malay cultural history, shaping social norms, village dynamics, traditional healing, and even the way communities interpret conflict or protection. Here is…
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Mendam Berahi: Could the fabled Malaccan ship have really existed?
For most of the last five centuries, the Mendam Berahi lived only in the imagination, half ship, half apparition. In the Hikayat Hang Tuah, the vessel gleams like a fever dream of Malacca’s golden age: a colossal royal galley built in secrecy, lacquered black, outfitted for diplomatic splendour, and entrusted to the Sultan’s most loyal…
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Why Some Histories Are Accepted Without Question, While Others Are Treated Like Myths
By someone who has spent more nights with old manuscripts than with actual people. History has a funny temperament. In some regions, it sits comfortably and unchallenged, like a pampered cat perched atop a bookshelf. Medieval Europe is allowed to have its knights and castles without anyone demanding footnotes. The Middle East enjoys an uncontested…
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Austronesians Didn’t Come From Taiwan,They rose from Southeast Asia
For nearly half a century, the world has been taught a strangely disempowering idea: that Austronesian peoples, the ancestors of Malays, Indonesians, Filipinos, and Polynesians, were not truly native to their own region. According to the familiar “Out of Taiwan” model, these populations supposedly sailed down from Taiwan around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, rapidly…
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Echoes of The Indigenous Narrative: Our Story Begins Here
For centuries, the voices of Southeast Asia’s first peoples have echoed through its forests, islands, and seas, yet their stories remain unheard. The Indigenous Narrative was created to change that. Southeast Asia is a region overflowing with diversity, heritage, and culture. From its mist-covered highlands to its vast archipelagos, this land has always been home…
The Indigenous Narrative 