We Came Back, but Not as We Left
Two decades ago, we returned — not as heroes, not as the enlightened, and certainly not as experts. We were simply young Indigenous people who had wandered far from our homelands, drifted into cities, classrooms, online worlds, and in many ways, away from ourselves.
Some of us came back from academic paths that never fully embraced us. Others returned from jobs in NGOs, in government, in media — places that asked us to speak about our communities, but never with them.
But home wasn’t waiting with open arms. It had been changed, twisted by decades of internal colonisation, drained by extractive industries, and quieted by a state language that was never ours. Many of our elders had forgotten the names of plants in our own forests. Our younger cousins spoke in Indonesian but didn’t know the lullabies our mothers sang. Even the mountains looked like strangers, stripped of trees and stories.
We didn’t come back with an agenda. We came back with a deep ache to remember, to restore, and to reclaim. That ache became Mawale.
When we came back, we weren’t coming home in the way most people imagine. There was no celebratory homecoming, no banners, no warm hugs from a grateful community waiting for their long-lost children. The truth is: we returned quietly, almost sheepishly — uncertain of what we were looking for, but certain we didn’t belong to the world we had just walked out of.
Some of us had left our villages in search of opportunity. Others had been sent away—told, as so many of our generation were, that success lay elsewhere: in cities, in classrooms, in offices where you wore shoes, spoke Indonesian, and never looked back. We were taught to aspire upwards—towards Jakarta, Java, abroad. Upwards always meant away. To go forward, we had to leave everything behind: our language, our songs, our ceremonies, our forests, our land, and even our names.
And we tried. We really did. We learned to code-switch. We memorised academic jargon and white people’s name. We worked in NGO offices with laminated mission statements. We wore the right clothes. We submitted the proposals. We filled in the monitoring and evaluation templates. But something always felt off. There was a deep spiritual fracture. A loneliness. A hollowness. We could speak eloquently in donor meetings about “local wisdom” while forgetting the taste of the food our grandmothers used to cook. We could write entire project proposals about cultural revitalisation without being able to sing one of our own lullabies.
The more we succeeded in their world, the more we disappeared from our own.
That dissonance began to weigh heavily. So we did something few people expected. We came back.
But we didn’t come back wearing batik and holding a PowerPoint presentation on “community empowerment.” We came back to listen. To grieve. To remember. To root ourselves again. To question the very idea of “development” and “modernity” that had seduced us into believing that we needed to become less of who we were in order to be taken seriously.
Coming home wasn’t easy. For many of us, it was uncomfortable, even painful. Our own relatives sometimes looked at us with suspicion: city kids who didn’t know how to plant, who spoke with accents, who asked too many questions. We were caught in between worlds — no longer fully part of the urban spaces we’d left, but not quite accepted back into the rhythm of the villages either. There was a dislocation, a sense of being out of place even in our place of origin.
And yet, that discomfort became fertile ground. We realised we weren’t alone.
There were others like us — returning, disoriented, asking hard questions, quietly starting to build something that didn’t have a name yet. We began to gather — not through formal invitations, but through shared longing. A longing for rootedness, for stories untold, for languages half-remembered. We met in kitchens, on porches, in abandoned school buildings, and under the shade of coconut trees. We brought guitars, typewriters, sketchbooks, and burning questions. Slowly, without intending to, we began to organise—not around strategy, but around story.
That was the genesis of Mawale. Not a launch, but a return. A return not only to land, but to language. Not only to rituals, but to rhythm. Not only to identity, but to uncertainty—the kind of uncertainty that leads to searching, and through searching, to solidarity.
We came back, yes. But we did not come back as we had left. We came back more fragmented, but also more determined. We came back as people who had seen the emptiness of representation without recognition. We came back to reclaim what had been silenced in us.
We did not return to lead. We returned to listen. We came back carrying broken pieces of ourselves, and in each other, we began to assemble something whole.
No Leaders, No Plan, Just Vision
In the early days of Mawale, people kept asking us the same question: “So, who’s in charge?”
It was as if the absence of a hierarchy made what we were doing illegible, unserious, even dangerous. People assumed we were just a group of friends hanging out. Which, to be fair, wasn’t entirely wrong — we were a group of friends. But friendship, for us, wasn’t accidental. It was the political glue. The shared ground. The roots of a different way of organising.
There were no chairpersons, no steering committees, no founding declarations carved in stone. We never wrote a constitution. Not because we were disorganised, but because we were deliberate. The idea of building a “structure” felt foreign, even violent. We had all witnessed how formal structures — especially in NGOs, student movements, or political parties — often ended up replicating the very power dynamics they claimed to resist. There was always someone above, someone below, someone left out, and someone stuck cleaning up the mess. We didn’t want that. We couldn’t afford that.
So we did the radical thing. We chose to trust each other.
We built Mawale as a space of visionary bonds, not organisational ones. Bonds rooted in shared values, cultural memory, and deep relational accountability — not bureaucratic roles. There was no one issuing orders, no one handing out tasks. If someone had an idea — a mural, a theatre performance, a writing workshop — they just did it. And others would come in, not because they were told to, but because the idea moved them. Because something about it resonated with the collective pulse.
We borrowed from the logic of swarms — ants, birds, bees, schools of fish. Movements that do not rely on central control but on subtle, mutual cues. A form of intelligence that arises from attentiveness, not authority. When one of us moved, others moved with them — not out of obligation, but from intuition, from trust.
That’s not to say everything was easy. In the absence of formal roles, there were moments of confusion, miscommunication, even burnout. But unlike in rigid hierarchies, those breakdowns didn’t escalate into crises of leadership. They were absorbed, metabolised, talked through. We were learning in real time how to care for each other without controlling each other. How to build a movement that didn’t become a machine.
When we speak of being “structureless,” people often misunderstand us. They think it means chaos. But chaos is not the absence of structure — it’s the absence of coherence. What we had was coherence, not in form, but in rhythm. Like a drum circle with no conductor, but everyone in sync. Like a tide — unpredictable, but steady in its return.
Our strength came from fluidity. From the refusal to freeze ourselves into roles, into brands, into a single model of what a “movement” should be. We didn’t want to become an organisation that would eventually have to chase donors, hire accountants, submit quarterly reports, and fire people when the funding dried up. We didn’t want to become professional activists. We wanted to remain collective dreamers in practice.
That’s why Mawale was never registered. Never released a glossy vision-mission statement. The closest thing we had to a plan was a shared sense of direction — a compass, not a map. We knew we were walking towards something that didn’t yet exist: a space where Indigenous youth could be both rooted and rebellious, both ancient and contemporary, both serious and playful. We didn’t know what form it would take. But we trusted the process.
We knew we weren’t building something to last forever. We were building something to live — to breathe, adapt, and transform alongside those who carried it. When one of us left to become a parent, or a schoolteacher, or simply to rest, the movement didn’t lose momentum. Others stepped in — not to replace them, but to continue in a different rhythm.
Mawale was never a straight line. It was always a current, flowing, winding, sometimes flooding, sometimes drying up, but never still.
That’s why we’ve survived. Not because we had a five-year plan or institutional backing. But because we refused to fix ourselves. Because we stayed supple, alive to the moment, responsive to each other.
If you ask us today who leads Mawale, we’ll shrug and smile. The truth is, it depends on the day. Sometimes it’s the teenage girl who turns her village’s folktales into graphic novels. Sometimes it’s the fisherman who hosts an impromptu storytelling night on his boat. Sometimes it’s the mother who lets us use her kitchen as a zine-making station. Leadership, for us, is not about standing in front. It’s about moving together.
And planning? Our plans are made in song lyrics, in late-night conversations, in group chats full of memes and logistical chaos. It’s messy, yes. But it’s alive. And aliveness is what we protect at all costs. Because movements that over-plan lose their pulse. Movements that over-lead forget to listen.
We didn’t want to become the next well-structured disappointment. We wanted to stay wild.
Art Is Not a Tool. It’s the Terrain.
For many people, especially those looking in from the outside, the art we made looked like decoration — colourful, spontaneous, maybe even unserious. But for us, art wasn’t an accessory to the movement. It wasn’t an outreach strategy or a “creative tool” to sugar-coat political messages. From the beginning, art was the terrain itself. It was where we gathered, where we wrestled with our histories, where we remembered, and where we healed. We didn’t “use” art. We lived it.
It began in small, fragile ways. A poem read aloud under a mango tree. A stencil of an ancestral figure sprayed onto a crumbling wall. A song, half-remembered from childhood, woven into a street performance. These weren’t strategic actions. They weren’t planned for impact. They emerged from longing — from the aching need to see and hear ourselves in a world that had made us invisible.
You see, when your language has been deemed informal, when your traditions are dismissed as “superstition,” and when your skin and accent mark you as peripheral in your own country, making art becomes an act of survival. It becomes a way to insist on your presence — to say, loudly and beautifully: We are still here. We never left.
We weren’t trying to break into the art world. We were trying to break open our own world.
For many of us, art became the first space where we could exist as our full selves. It was the first place where our anger didn’t need footnotes, where our grief didn’t need permits, and where our laughter — wild, irreverent, and often full of double meanings — could be sacred again. It allowed us to sidestep the suffocating seriousness of formal activism, with its conferences, acronyms, and policy briefings. Not because those things don’t matter, but because they weren’t enough. They didn’t speak the language of the soul.
So we made our own languages.
We stitched our resistance into art performances and painted our dreams on plywood. We choreographed dances that slipped between ritual and rebellion. We created poems and writes stories in Manado Malay that didn’t just share information but revived ways of thinking that had been shamed out of our schools. Our creativity wasn’t abstract — it was rooted in place, in memory, and in relation.
One of our early first collective actions was a theatre piece staged in a village chapel — a place that usually prohibited anything deemed “non-Christian.” We told a reimagined version of an old local myth, blending traditional storytelling with punk and blues music, and using dialogue in three languages: Manado Malay, Indonesian, and the tribal words. There were no tickets. People came because they were curious, maybe even sceptical. Later, many of them — mostly youth, stayed. They listened, they observed, and they found themselves within our talks, our conversations, our performances, our writings. They cried. They saw themselves.
Art gave us permission to feel again — not just anger or despair, but joy, absurdity, and eroticism, too. In a political landscape that reduced Indigenous people to either tragic victims or noble savages, we claimed the full spectrum of our humanity.
And perhaps most importantly, art allowed us to organise without becoming organisers. When we hosted a poem reading day, we didn’t need a press release. We only need stories, and time. When we distribute a poem book made by young people in their own language, we weren’t just sharing knowledge — we’re restoring dignity. When we gathered to make music sounds from traditional instruments and beat-up electric guitars, we’re composing futures that aren’t bound by binary choices: tradition or modernity, local or global, past or present.
Art helped us move through and beyond those binaries. We didn’t call it “artivism.” We didn’t call it anything. It was just how we moved. How we spoke. How we remembered.
People would later ask if Mawale had an “art programme.” We’d laugh. There was no programme. There was just practice. The practice of showing up, creating, messing up, doing it again. No galleries. No curators. Just us, the land, and the materials we could get our hands on.
Our poems weren’t made to win awards. They were made to disrupt silence. Our performances weren’t polished. They were honest. Raw. Sometimes chaotic. But always rooted in truth. Sometimes we rehearsed for days in the rain under someone’s stilt house, electricity flickering, rice cooking in the corner. Other times, we improvised entirely, trusting the moment to guide us.
Through art, we built relations. We connected generations, reconnected severed stories, and found ways to honour the past without being trapped in it. Elders came to watch youth perform reimagined rituals and were moved to tears—not because it was accurate, but because it was alive. Children learned words their parents had forgotten. Songs returned, not as museum pieces, but as living sounds.
And through this process, we made something else: an archive. Not the kind stored in locked cabinets, but a living, breathing cultural memory. A memory held in bodies, in books painted with ancestral wisdom, in videos of silent stories told by our elders, in stories passed over dinner, in poems whispered over waves.
Mawale never saw art as separate from life. Our books were printed independently, folded by hand, and sold in our own hosted events. Our posters were stapled onto wooden kiosks alongside political campaign flyers. Our music was recorded on borrowed phones, mixed on broken laptops, and uploaded when someone’s internet signal was strong enough.
It wasn’t about aesthetics. It was about access. About making sure our people could see themselves — not as exoticised backdrops, not as tragic statistics, but as creators of their own futures.
In a world where extractive industries poison our rivers and politicians auction off our forests in the name of progress, reclaiming beauty becomes a form of resistance. When you create a song about land, you’re not just making art — you’re calling something sacred back into presence. When you sculpt ancestral spirits from recycled plastic, you’re not just recycling — you’re resurrecting.
We were never waiting to be discovered. We were discovering each other. And through that discovery, we found new ways to be Indigenous. Not as heritage, but as horizon.
That is why art remains the heart of Mawale. Not a department. Not a campaign strategy. But the space in which we move, the terrain on which we meet, and the language through which we dream.
Because when all else collapses — when policies shift, when NGOs dissolve, when internet signals fail — what remains is the story. The dance. The song.
What remains is art.
The Mother Tongue That Refuses to Die
The language of Mawale is not Indonesian. We chose to speak, write, and dream in Manado Malay. This was not an aesthetic decision. It was political.
Manado Malay is the language of our mothers, our markets, our boat songs, our scoldings, our flirtations. It’s the language of joy and grief. It is messy, fluid, hybrid—and absolutely ours. Yet for decades, it has been dismissed as a mere “local dialect,” unworthy of literature, policy, or education.
Indonesian, the so-called “national” language, was never our spoken tongue. It was imposed—from radio, from textbooks, from bureaucracies. It came with shame. Teachers punished children for using Manado Malay in classrooms. Job interviews demanded “proper” Indonesian. Even NGOs that worked “for Indigenous rights” spoke in a tongue that erased us.
So we resisted. We wrote poems in Manado Malay. We conducted workshops in it. We built and published our books around its rhythms. We normalised it again — not to preserve it in a museum, but to keep it alive on our tongues. It became our lingua franca of defiance. If Indonesian was the language of formal power, Manado Malay was the language of the people.
Because we believes that there’s always something intimate about the language you dream in. Something sacred. It’s not just a means of communication — it’s a map of your imagination, a reflection of your worldview. It tells you how your people laugh, how they curse, how they pray, how they fall in love. Language holds the soul of a place.
For us, that language is Manado Malay — Bahasa Manado, or more accurately, torang pe bahasa. It is loud, irreverent, playful, and at times unapologetically vulgar. It carries the cadence of fishermen shouting across docks, the mountaineers who carries the hunting meats, the gossip of market vendors, the proverbs of grandmothers, and the banter of migrants. It is alive. It moves like water — always shifting, never fixed.
And yet, for generations, we were told it wasn’t enough.
In school, we were punished for using Manado Malay. “That’s not proper language,” teachers would say. “Speak Indonesian.” Speak Bahasa Indonesia, the so-called language of unity. The language of textbooks, of government offices, of national exams. The language that has never lived in our bodies the way Manado Malay does.
This forced separation between the language of the people and the language of power did more than just create confusion. It created shame. It told us that the way we naturally spoke was broken. That our tongue was too wild, too improper, too informal to be taken seriously. It told us that if we wanted to be educated, to be successful, to be modern, we had to silence ourselves.
For many of us, that silence lasted years.
Even within progressive spaces — NGOs, universities, youth organisations — there was little room for Manado Malay. People still deferred to the clean, standardised tone of Bahasa Indonesia. Press releases, social media campaigns, public forums — all polished in the language of Jakarta, scrubbed of local flair, stripped of rhythm. In these spaces, we became translations of ourselves.
So, when Mawale began, one of the first decisions we made — though we never sat down and formally declared it — was that Manado Malay would be the language of the movement. Not just occasionally, not just for spice or “local flavour,” but as the default tongue in which we thought, created, organised, and resisted.
It was a radical choice — not because the language was rare or endangered (it’s spoken daily by millions across North Sulawesi and the surrounding islands), but because it had been deliberately excluded from platforms of visibility. And by centring it, we weren’t just expressing ourselves — we were dismantling the colonial hierarchy of language that had long divided our world into “centre” and “margin,” “proper” and “improper,” “civilised” and “vernacular.”
We started small. Our poems books printed in Manado Malay. Poetry performed in village dialects. Plays written entirely in the rhythms of street speech. Our newsletters weren’t “translated” — they were rooted. And people responded. Grandmothers cried. Teenagers laughed. Elders who had never attended a “youth event” before stayed for hours because they could finally understand — not just linguistically, but emotionally, spiritually.
There’s power in hearing your own voice not as a joke, but as a story. Not as a mistake, but as a memory.
Language is one of the fiercest battlegrounds in colonial history. Indonesia’s founding elites knew this well. That’s why the national language was chosen to “unify” the archipelago—a tool to erase hundreds of distinct tongues in the name of progress. But what they failed to understand is that unity forced through silence is not unity at all. It’s assimilation. And assimilation always demands the death of something sacred.
We weren’t willing to let our language die.
But our decision to centre Manado Malay wasn’t just a political protest. It was also a pedagogical experiment. We started to ask: what happens when young people learn in the language they speak at home? What happens when cultural memory is passed not through subtitles but through song lyrics and jokes and riddles? What happens when the language of resistance is also the language of your grandmother?
What happens, in other words, when you stop translating your soul? The answer is simple: people start to show up.
And they did. Youth who had never felt comfortable in formal discussions suddenly became storytellers. Mothers who rarely spoke in public became fierce speakers. Children started composing songs in a tongue they were previously told to discard. Language became not only a tool — it became a mirror, a drumbeat, a form of collective breathing.
We also began documenting. We collected local proverbs, idioms, folk tales, riddles, curses, lullabies. We wrote them down, recorded them, turned them into posters, comics, and short films. We understood that cultural survival wasn’t just about performance — it was about transmission. And transmission depends on language.
Over time, Manado Malay stopped being just “our choice.” It became our foundation. Our practice. Our code of ethics. Because to speak in our mother tongue — even if it has been bent, hybridised, and laughed at — is to assert our right to exist on our own terms.
In Mawale, we don’t call it a “local language.” That’s too small. We call it our language. Our sea-road of memory. Our syntax of survival. Our verb for dreaming.
And yes, sometimes we still need to switch to Indonesian — for reports, for emails, for media interviews. But when we do, we know we’re translating from something, not into it. The centre of gravity has shifted.
Because we no longer aspire to speak like Jakarta. We aspire to speak like home.
Manado Malay is not a remnant of the past. It’s the rhythm of our future. And as long as Mawale breathes, it will breathe in this tongue — imperfect, unwieldy, full of jokes and longing and stubborn, stubborn life.
Growing Without Losing Ourselves
When Mawale began, we were fewer than twenty. We were student activists, farmers’ children, wannabe artists, self-taught archivists. We had no funding, no connections, and certainly no political backing. But we had fire — and each other.
We held workshops in homes. We made books on borrowed printers. We shared food, stories, books, and silence.
Now, Mawale has grown into a loose network of over a hundred active participants and many more who flow in and out of the movement. Some identify as part of Mawale. Others simply carry its spirit. We’ve never had a membership list. We never will. That’s not how movements like this survive.
You’ll find Mawale in community libraries built from salvaged wood, in dance groups that revive ancestral movements with blues and rock beats, in storytelling circles under starlit skies. You’ll find us in WhatsApp groups planning rituals and film screenings. In coastal youth who map coral degradation using GPS. In coffee farmers who advocates for direct trades and cooperation.
We didn’t scale up. We spread out.
We never set out to grow. That might sound strange in a world obsessed with scaling up, building movements, and expanding reach. But the truth is, Mawale was never about numbers. It was about need. And in the beginning, only two dozen of us were brave — or broken — enough to admit we needed something different.
Most of us were in our early twenties. Some still in university. Others in between jobs, burned out from NGO work, disillusioned by student politics, or freshly returned from cities that had drained us of language, place, and purpose. We were exhausted, but not defeated. There was still fire, just no clear direction for it to burn.
So we gathered. First in each other’s houses, later in village halls, schools, and finally, forests and beaches. We brought with us whatever we had — guitars, notebooks, spices and meats, stolen WiFi, and questions. Always the questions. Why did we feel so unrooted? Why was it easier to explain ourselves to foreigners than to our own families? Why did activism feel like a performance, and culture feel like a museum piece? Why did everything that felt sacred seem so far away?
In those early gatherings, we didn’t try to fix anything. We just listened. To each other. To the land. To the sound of waves hitting coral, the crackle of banana leaves over fire, the laughter of children mocking our serious faces. Slowly, we began to unlearn what had been imposed and re-learn what had been waiting.
And people noticed.
Not through hashtags. Not through press releases. But through presence. That’s how it spread. Organically. Intimately. One conversation at a time. One spark lighting another.
Soon, we were no longer just two dozen. We were fifty. Then eighty. Then a hundred. Not all active at once. Not all visible. But connected by something deeper than structure — a shared sense that we were becoming again. That we were not alone in our longing.
And as we grew, we resisted the temptation to formalise. We knew the danger of growth. We had seen movements collapse under the weight of their own ambitions. The bigger they got, the more they sought funding, branding, and professionalisation. They became organisations. And organisations, as we had learned, often forget why they were born in the first place.
So we made a decision: Mawale would grow outward, not upward. We wouldn’t build a headquarters. We’d build networks. We wouldn’t form departments. We’d form friendships. We wouldn’t make hierarchies. We’d make circles.
That meant embracing inconsistency. Some nodes would go quiet for months. Others would explode with activity. Some people would leave without saying goodbye. Others would arrive and never want to leave. That was fine. We weren’t measuring participation. We were nurturing presence.
And presence comes in many forms. Some wrote essays. Others cooked meals. Some led rituals. Others edited audio and video files at 2 a.m. in a friend’s kitchen. There were no stars. No celebrity activists. No formal roles. Only relational responsibilities.
You showed up for each other because you wanted to. Because you felt the rhythm. Because you trusted the process—even when it was slow, messy, or confusing.
And as we grew, something beautiful happened. The work deepened.
The boy who used to doodle in the back of the workshop now runs his own art collective, bringing together coastal youth to paint stories of their ancestors. The woman who once hesitated to speak in public now facilitates community dialogues on extractivism and gender justice. The quietest among us have become poets. The loudest have learned to listen.
And more importantly, the movement began to intervene in daily life, not just cultural life. People began organising their own rituals without waiting for permission. They started reviving traditional food systems. They mapped ancestral territories. They challenged church sermons that demonised Indigenous practices. They built libraries in their villages—not to compete with state education, but to complement it with stories that mattered.
Mawale was no longer just a gathering of youth. It had become a culture of remembering and re-imagining. A space where people could breathe differently. Speak differently. Act differently. And in that space, the lines between art, resistance, and life itself began to blur.
We didn’t brand ourselves. We didn’t sell the movement. But people began to identify with it. Not because we told them to. But because they saw themselves in it.
“I’m with Mawale,” someone would say — not to claim membership, but to signal a worldview. A commitment to something both ancient and emergent. A refusal to be spoken for. A love for the land and for each other.
We had no gatekeepers. No official list. If you were doing the work, you were Mawale.
And so it spread.
From two dozen youth in scattered towns, coastal and mountain villages, we have grown into a constellation — hundreds strong. Not a movement with mass rallies or viral videos. But a quiet, steady murmur reshaping how we see ourselves, our communities, and our possibilities.
And we’ve done it without losing ourselves. Because every step of the way, we’ve asked the same question: are we still listening? Are we still rooted? Are we still together?
If the answer is yes, we keep going. If the answer is no, we pause. Re-root. Re-gather. That’s the rhythm. That’s the pact. That’s why Mawale still lives—not as an institution, but as a collective breath.
Homecoming Is More Than Geography. It’s Practice.
We talk a lot about “returning home” in Mawale. But for us, it’s not about nostalgia. It’s not about going back to some imagined pure past. Homecoming is political. It is daily. It is practice.
For many Indigenous youth, returning home means facing shame — shame instilled by education systems, religious institutions, and social norms that told us our culture was backward. Some had forgotten their mother tongue. Others had never participated in rituals because they were told it was “idolatry” or “old-fashioned.”
Mawale helped us unlearn that shame. We created safe spaces for re-learning rituals, even if awkwardly. We embraced mistakes. We held collective ceremonies to honour our ancestors — even if we didn’t remember all the steps. We read old songs and made new ones. We brought palm sugar wine and guitars and played both traditional and modern songs.
We didn’t just talk about land rights. We built seed banks. We mapped our territories by walking them. We learned plant names from grandmothers and created posters to teach them to kids.
This was homecoming — not as tourism, but as return to relation.
People often romanticise the idea of “coming home.” As if it’s a simple act. As if returning to your ancestral village, stepping onto the soil where your grandparents once danced, automatically restores you. As if home is waiting, whole and unbroken, ready to embrace you. But that’s not how it happened for us.
Home didn’t feel like home when we returned.
The rivers we remembered were dammed or dry. The forests thinned or sold off. Our elders were tired. Some resigned, others afraid. Our traditions — what little remained — were often buried beneath shame or stripped into museum pieces. In some places, the land had been sold to mining companies. In others, it was the mind that had been mined — extracted of pride, of memory, of language.
And yet, we came back. Not because it was easy, but because there was nowhere else left to go. We came back not looking for comfort, but for continuity. Not for answers, but for a place to ask better questions.
But coming home, we quickly realised, is not a return to place. It’s a return to relation.
To belong is not about having a house or land title. It’s about knowing whose songs shaped your laughter, whose hands planted the trees you now sit under, whose grief still lingers in the salt of your grandmother’s tears. Belonging is not a destination. It’s a series of practices. Daily acts of remembrance. Relational gestures of care.
And so, in Mawale, we began to treat homecoming as practice — not a one-time event, not a project with deliverables, but a long and messy process of reconnection.
For many of us, that process began in awkwardness. Some of us didn’t speak the village dialect fluently anymore. Some had never participated in traditional ceremonies — not because we weren’t interested, but because we were told it was uncivilised. Others came from families who had long converted, who considered ancestral rituals as demonic or simply irrelevant.
So we started small.
One of the first things we did as a group was organise a storytelling night — not to perform, but to listen. We sat with elders and asked about the stars. The birds. The seasons. The smells. The stories they were told as children. Many were hesitant at first. Suspicious. They’d been spoken over for decades. But slowly, they opened. They remembered. And in their remembering, we began to reassemble fragments of ourselves.
We learned how to sit again. How to stay quiet. How to let silences stretch without trying to fill them with explanations. We swept floors before events. We carried water. We joined funerals not just for solidarity but because that’s where the real teachings happened—in the wails, in the pauses, in the food passed around after the mourning.
We cooked together. Drunk together. Fumbled through ceremonies we barely knew how to conduct. And when no one remembered the exact ritual, we invented something that felt close. We stitched broken memory with imagination. Because that’s what survival looks like.
Some people said we were being “inauthentic.” That our version of tradition was too modern, too messy. But we knew better. Authenticity is not purity. It’s participation.
To come home is to make yourself useful again. Not as a saviour, but as kin.
That’s why we cleaned sacred wells. We mapped ancestral graves. We helped build rice barns using traditional designs. Not because we were performing heritage, but because we were returning to relational responsibility. To be Indigenous, we realised, is not to live in the past. It is to live in relation — with land, with water, with spirit, with community.
And that takes work. Not ideology.
We hosted workshops on seed-saving — not because it was trendy, but because our grandmothers’ knowledge of rice varieties was disappearing. We held rituals to honour ancestors who had never been properly buried, whose names were forgotten in textbooks but remembered in dreams. We walked the land. We sat by rivers. We learned the names of plants—not the Latin classifications, but the names that held jokes, warnings, cures.
We also made mistakes. Lots of them. Sometimes we performed ceremonies without understanding their meaning. Sometimes we offended elders by speaking out of turn. Sometimes we rushed. But we kept returning. And the land, somehow, kept accepting us. The mountain did not shame us. The sea did not mock our stumbling prayers. Home, we realised, is patient — so long as you come in humility.
It’s important to say that not everyone can “go back” physically. Some of our friends are urban-born, some displaced, some whose lands have been lost to plantations, ports, or gated developments. But homecoming is not about property. It’s about practice.
If you cook your grandmother’s dish and tell your niece the story behind it, that’s homecoming. If you learn one forgotten word a day and speak it aloud, that’s homecoming. If you remember the name of the hill your great-uncle used to sing about, and you whisper it before you sleep — that too, is homecoming.
In Mawale, we began creating these micro-practices of return. Not grand gestures, but quiet rituals. Writing down recipes. Replanting herbal gardens. Creating family trees on brown paper. Recording lullabies. Even cleaning the forgotten graves. Acts of maintenance, not just resistance.
And these practices changed us.
We stopped waiting for institutions to “recognise” us. We started recognising ourselves. We didn’t need permits to love the land. We didn’t need policy reform to teach our children the names of the birds. We didn’t need grants to perform rituals for our ancestors.
Coming home, we learned, is not about recovering some ancient purity. It’s about entering a living covenant—with place, with people, with memory, and with future generations.
It is work. It is love. It is rhythm.
And in a world where borders continue to displace, where extractive economies continue to desecrate, and where institutions continue to co-opt, we’ve come to understand that homecoming is one of the most radical things an Indigenous youth can do.
Because to come home is to remember who you are. And to remember who you are is to become ungovernable.
Intervening Culture, Not Just Protesting Power
Mawale doesn’t shout in front of parliaments. That’s not our terrain. We intervene elsewhere — quieter but just as powerfully.
We interrupt cultural stagnation. We critique religious institutions that co-opt Indigenous identities for branding but shun rituals as “unholy.” We question academic projects that treat our knowledge as data, not wisdom. We challenge art spaces that fetishise “local colour” but exclude our languages.
We create cultural refusal. Refusal to be commodified. Refusal to be pigeonholed. Refusal to be told who we are by outsiders — no matter how well-meaning.
Our arena is not state policy. It’s cultural power. And in that field, we’re unstoppable.
In the early years, we thought resistance meant shouting louder. Marching longer. Holding bigger banners. We organised protests, staged sit-ins, issued statements — just like those who came before us. And it mattered. It still matters.
But the more we protested, the more we began to feel the weight of a terrible truth: power wasn’t just outside of us. It had already taken root inside us — how we thought, how we spoke, how we imagined. We were fluent in the language of critique, but illiterate in the language of cultural intervention. We were good at saying no, but hadn’t yet learned how to build a deeper yes.
So, we shifted.
Not away from protest — but beyond it. We began to understand that to truly challenge extractive systems, we had to go beneath the surface. To the sediment. To the stories that make those systems feel normal. To the culture that makes exploitation seem like development, that frames Indigenous knowledge as superstition, that treats slowness as laziness, that sees the land as real estate, and the sea as a logistics route.
Because you can overthrow a corrupt official, but if the culture that created him remains intact, another will take his place.
That’s when we decided: our struggle is not only against extractive economies, but against extractive imaginations. And that changes everything.
We began to intervene not only in policy, but in narrative. Not only in governance, but in symbols. Not only in protest spaces, but in weddings, funerals, Sunday services, village karaoke nights, social media posts, school textbooks, and Instagram reels.
We showed up where culture was being shaped — not where it was being archived. Not in museums, but in day to day life. Not in academic conferences, but in real time face to face conversation with people. Not just on the streets, but at the coffee shops.
We started rewriting local myths — not to correct them, but to reclaim them. We created art, weaving stories of land, memory, and feminine wisdom. We planted coffee and initiated sustainable farming and cooperative businesses not to commodify, but to create conversation.
People started paying attention — not because we were louder, but because we were closer. To their lives. To their griefs. To their laughter.
Because culture is not abstract. It lives in habits, jokes, prayers, wedding dresses, song choices. And that’s where colonialism hides too — not only in government policy, but in the unquestioned rituals of daily life.
That’s why we refused to limit ourselves to “activist spaces.” We weren’t interested in becoming professional protesters. We didn’t want to be trapped in the cycle of petition–protest–press release. We wanted to go upstream. To shift the current. To intervene before people even knew what needed to be changed.
So we turned our focus to cultural fault lines. Why do families mock their children for speaking Manado Malay in front of guests? Why do teenage boys laugh at the idea of weaving? Why are ancestral graves left to rot, while colonial churches are kept pristine? Why do we still think the city is “progress” and the village is “behind”?
We asked these questions not as critics, but as cultural workers — those who repair the torn fabric, thread by thread.
We worked with aunties who ran food stalls, asking them about old recipes. We helped them turn those recipes into illustrated stories that their children could read. We supported elders to speak in public using their own dialects—even if it was only for five minutes—so the young ones could hear what dignity sounds like in their mother tongue.
We intervened in weddings, suggesting couples add ancestral blessings to their ceremonies. We worked with youth pastors to introduce Indigenous cosmology into their Sunday reflections. We created memes that joked about decolonisation, but hit home.
Not everyone agreed. Some elders were uncomfortable. Some activists dismissed our work as “soft.” But we knew better. We knew that culture is where change becomes sustainable. You can ban a mine, but if the village still believes mining is the only way to survive, the ban won’t last. You can pass a land rights law, but if people have forgotten how to relate to the land with love and reciprocity, the law is meaningless.
Cultural work is slow. It doesn’t go viral. It doesn’t win awards. But it sticks. It’s the work that seeps into dreams. Into lullabies. Into what a child thinks is beautiful. Into what a grandmother considers holy.
That’s why, in Mawale, we say: we are not only protesting what is wrong — we are making visible what could be right. We are not only pointing fingers — we are extending hands. We are not only denouncing colonialism — we are whispering alternatives into the bones of our communities.
Because if you do not shift the culture, the politics will always find a way back. We are doing the slow work of remembering forward.
We are intervening not for applause, not for headlines, but for the kind of change that lasts beyond elections and revolutions. The kind of change that shows up in how a girl sees her nose in the mirror. In how a boy sings without shame. In how a community begins to imagine life without extraction.
Because culture is not a backdrop to resistance. It is resistance.
There Is No Final Goal, and That’s the Point
From the beginning, we were clear: Mawale is not a political party. It’s not a youth programme. It’s not a step on the ladder to professionalism. It’s a movement that refuses to arrive. We have no final goal. And that’s deliberate.
Too many movements die trying to become institutions. We’ve seen grassroots initiatives get co-opted, NGO-ised, grant-washed. They start with fire, but end up with staff meetings and reports that nobody reads.
Mawale was designed as a rhythm, not a roadmap. We move through three stages—though always non-linearly. First, the practice: trying, testing, creating, messing up. Second, evaluation: not based on KPIs, but on energy, community trust, and lived impact. Third, the dialectic: a constant culture of self-criticism, refusal to glorify our own narratives, and openness to dissolve and reform.
We question ourselves often. Are we still rooted? Are we still useful? Are we still listening?
This reflexivity keeps us honest. It also keeps us alive regardless how people outside the movement often ask, “So what’s the endgame?” They want a finish line. A measurable outcome. A theory of change with indicators, outputs, milestones. Something tidy. Something that can be reported, evaluated, packaged. Something that fits neatly into a donor’s logframe.
We don’t have one. And we never will.
Not because we’re aimless, but because we’ve chosen a different path. Because in Mawale, we don’t believe in the illusion of arrival. We believe in the rhythm of return.
From the very beginning, we knew this movement was not designed to “win.” We weren’t fighting for inclusion in someone else’s system. We weren’t trying to get a seat at a table built on someone else’s terms. We were trying to build our own fire. A fire that could gather, warm, and feed those of us still searching for something more rooted, more intimate, more alive.
Mawale wasn’t formed to build an institution. It was formed as a stage of practice—a living space where we could test, try, stumble, and stretch. Where culture wasn’t archived, but activated. Where we could ask questions without knowing the answers. Where we could make mistakes, self-correct, and keep moving.
That’s why I always describe Mawale journey in three interwoven stages: the initial stage, the evaluative stage, and the dialectical stage. These aren’t linear. They loop. They fold. They breathe.
The initial stage is where most of us begin — with a spark, an itch, a longing. Maybe it’s a song your grandmother used to sing that won’t leave your mind. Maybe it’s a painting you saw in a cousin’s house that stirred something in your belly. Maybe it’s rage — at a policy, a sermon, a silence. That’s where practice begins: in the refusal to forget. In the refusal to wait for permission to remember.
This stage is about activation. About reclaiming the confidence to create without seeking validation. For many of us, it’s messy. It’s uncertain. It’s often lonely. But it’s also full of magic. Because it’s where you realise: you’re not the only one feeling this.
The work deepens during what I called the evaluation stage. Where practice becomes pattern. Where we ask ourselves — not in meetings, but around late-night drinks, or impromptu kitchen chats: Is this still working? Are we still listening to each other? Are we still speaking from the belly, or just from habit?
We learn how to assess without becoming rigid. We value feeling as much as outcome. Rhythm as much as result. A mural that makes three grandmothers cry may be more important than a campaign that reaches 10,000 likes. A poem that helps someone remember their ancestral name matters more to us than a policy brief read by a minister who never lived what we live.
Evaluation, for us, is not accountability to donors. It’s accountability to each other. To the land. To those who walked before us and those yet to be born.
The dialectical stage is the heart of our self-criticism. Not in the punitive way of cancel culture or the endless self-flagellation of activist circles, but in the way of relational correction. Of saying: That didn’t sit right. That felt extractive.
It’s about staying awake. Staying honest. Staying in dialogue — not only with others, but with ourselves. And with the movement as a living entity. Because Mawale, for all its freedom and fluidity, is not immune to mistakes. We’ve hurt each other. We’ve missed things. We’ve been arrogant at times. But what saves us is our commitment to come back. To talk. To reflect. To apologise. To try again.
And none of this is designed to lead to a final state. There’s no certificate. No graduation. No “impact achieved.” Because that kind of thinking — that fixates on closure — is colonial at its core. It imagines change as linear. It believes in the conquest of time. It reduces transformation to deadlines.
We don’t believe in endings. We believe in process.
This is why Mawale is not interested in becoming an NGO, a foundation, or a cultural institution with permanent office space and five-year plans. The moment something becomes fixed, it begins to decay. It starts performing itself. It becomes hollow.
Our strength lies in being in motion. In choosing to remain shapeshifting. In remaining multiple. We don’t want to become a brand. We want to remain a beat—something that people can dance to, speak with, organise around, or simply sit beside when they feel unmoored.
And this refusal to define a final goal is not because we’re disorganised. It’s because we know our struggle is not about arriving. It’s about returning — again and again — to what matters.
To the land. To the story. To each other.
And in a world where everything is being turned into a product, a KPI, a commodity, choosing to remain in practice is its own form of resistance. So no, we don’t know what Mawale will look like in five years. In fact, none of us want to know.
We want it to remain what it has always been: a constellation, a current, a home you make with your hands, again and again, or a fire you keep alive — not for the end, but for the night ahead.
The Murmur That Continues
So here we are. Twenty years since a small group of confused, defiant, passionate young people came home and asked, “What does it mean to be Indigenous now?” We didn’t find an answer. But we created a movement built around asking better questions.
We don’t pretend to be leaders. We’re just part of the murmur. The quiet wave. The tide that retreats only to rise again.
Some of us have become parents. Others have passed on. Many have left, and many more have joined. The movement breathes as we breathe. There is no Mawale without the people who make it, leave it, break it, and remake it.
We never planned to mark twenty years. Time just moved the way tides do — steadily, quietly, without fanfare. There was no founding declaration, no dramatic beginning. Just a few of us, tired and searching, sitting by the water with stories in our hands and something unspeakable rising in our chests.
But here we are. Two decades later. Still sitting by that same sea and mountain. And somehow, it remembers us.
Not just our names, but our silences. Our mistakes. Our trying. The songs we didn’t finish writing. The prayers we forgot how to say. The gatherings that fizzled out. The ones that bloomed unexpectedly. The laughter that still echoes from a kitchen in Sonder, from a backyard in Tondano, from the back of a small canteen at the University of Sam Ratulangi where our first three poem books were launched.
It remembers.
The sea has always been more than setting. It has been our witness. Our teacher. Our mirror. It has never demanded clarity from us. It has never insisted on productivity. It accepts us in cycles. In fragments. It forgives when we falter. It dances when we return.
And return, we always do.
Because even when some of us move away — get jobs, raise families, lose track of the rhythm — there is still something that pulls us back. A song, a smell, a photo shared in the Mawale group chat. A sudden craving for fried banana or tinutuan. We come back, not just to the movement, but to ourselves. To each other. To the shared memory we’ve been building all this time.
It’s not perfect. It’s not even always clear. But it’s ours.
And what we’ve built — not in buildings, but in bonds — has begun to ripple far beyond what we imagined. We’ve become part of the soil. Of the wind. Of the way things move here now. Not because we designed it that way, but because we stayed. Because we listened.
Because we never stopped believing that resistance doesn’t have to shout — it can hum. That revolution doesn’t always arrive with a bang — sometimes it grows like roots, quietly, underfoot.
There were times we thought of giving up. When the movement felt too slow, too fragmented, too intangible. But then someone would paint something raw. Or someone else would show up with an idea or an invitation to an event. And just like that, the fire would reignite.
Mawale has never been a movement of heroes. We don’t have charismatic leaders. We don’t have martyrs. We have each other. And that has been enough.
So now, as we look back — not to close a chapter, but to honour the journey — we do so with gratitude.
To the elders who tolerated our clumsiness. To the youth who trusted us with their futures. To the land that held our gatherings without complaint. To the ancestors who whispered back when we finally learned how to listen.
And to the sea and mountains — who never forgot our names, even when we forgot our way. Twenty years on, we still carry no flag. No endgame. No blueprint.
Only a commitment: to keep returning, to keep creating, to keep intervening in the name of memory, dignity, and joy.
Because Mawale is not what we built. It’s what builds us. Again and again, like waves tirelessly approaching the beach, as the wind walks back and fort on the mountain ridge. Like the unfinished story — one name, one note, one homecoming at a time.
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