LEARNING HOUSE LIRE KUNUME: A Tool To Reclaim Our Papuans Identity

By Rio Kogoya

Rio Kogoya is an indigenous youth of West Papua who comes from the highland part of the region, from the Lani tribe. He is also a member of Progressive Papuan Youth (KMP2), a collective of Papuan youth established in Jakarta in 2023. The first aim was to discuss and develop a progressive individuals to fight the mainstream solutions to the West Papua conflict, and also to eliminate patronism in the democratic movement. The collective has adapted the principles of Democratic Confederalism developed by Abdullah Öcalan to organize people. Another adopted principle is to understand not to command, adopted by the Zapatista movement in Mexico.

Since the control of Indonesian government over West Papua began, supported by western imperialists, the indigenous Papuans have lost everything. Our forest, water, land and culture are destroyed by the exploitation of our homeland. Many Papuans saw the Indonesian government’s existence as a colonial state. It has occupied our ancestral land and been bombing our villages since 1961s.

In the process of occupation, the Indonesian government is trying to alter the vast demography of populations by implementing the transmigration program, implemented 1964 until 1999 under president Soeharto’s regime. Even though the program has existed since the western colonization, here I will only focus on the Indonesian colonial regime. The program stopped in 1999 but the newly elected president, Prabowo Subianto, was eager to activate it again in 2023. The transmigration program aims to relocate people mainly from Java to West Papua, the political reason is to help the development in West Papua. The impact was extraordinary towards native people. Our ways of life, traditions and populations are dominated by the outsider. And the government is seizing massive amounts of the indigenous land for transmigrants to utilize. The shift in population has also triggered tensions between native people and outsiders (pendatang). Many have argued the program is part of settler colonialism.

Alongside the transmigration program there is also massive exploitation, keeping indigenous Papuans away from their land and culture. For example, the food program called the National Strategic Project (PSN). Taking over millions of hectares of customary land to plant sugarcane. Both programs are run by the military, who came to protect the transmigrants and PSN.

The West Papuan Youth

The colonialism in West Papua has affected the youth. Histories have shown us that the colonizer state everywhere is always trying to vanish the culture and tradition of the colonized. Trying to separate the young generation from their roots and leaving them feeling inferior. The colonial state has injected their education and values of life. Aiming to frame what belongs to the colonized as bad, superstition, and containing dark magic.

In West Papua most young people are not speaking in our mother tongue, practicing our traditions, or wearing traditional clothes anymore. Sometimes we feel shy, outdated and afraid. In 1970 there was a military operation named Koteka Operation (Operasi Koteka) the Indonesian army banned indigenous people in the mountains (Wamena, Enarotali and Wagate) from wearing Koteka, traditional clothes. They are forced to wear modern apparel like pants, shirts etc. as a symbol of civilization. In school we only learned about Javaness and other western Indonesian culture and history. Only being given limited knowledge about ours. There are 250 tribes in West Papua each with different local knowledge but we homogenised as our customary house, Honai1. Meanwhile, there are Befak from Malind tribe, Kunume from Dani, Kamasan from Biak and many more.

For me personally the deadliest impact of colonialism in West Papua is the women’s oppression. It is supported by the expansion of capital in mega projects and mining such as PT Freeport, PSN, BP Petroleum and many others. In the past our ancestors valued women as the source of life. They are the ones who nurture the land and protect the forest. The divisions of labour between male and female was clear, for instance the men are in charge of clearing the garden while women plant the vegetables. And harvesting will then be done together. The first crops will be distributed to the whole community then the next we can use for our household. We lived side by side and solved everything together. But when the colonizer state started from the west to create an Indonesia that was supported by imperialism, everything became blurry and was destroyed.

Alongside the presence of multinational companies supported by the Indonesian government, women suffer a lot. In our traditions the men possess land and they have the rights to decide what to do with it. But the decisions must be for the benefits of the whole community. It changed after multinational companies and other extractive government projects came. The corporations use bribery as a strategy. They approached some indigenous leaders and politicians to give them cash, alcohol and women sex workers to hand over the land ownership rights for the company2. Indigenous women were never involved in the process while they are the one who nurture the land. This leads to violence in the domestic area.  

Liru Kunume and The Reclaiming

In the middle of uncertainty and oppression we still believe that there is hope, as long as we the young generation organize ourselves and fight back. In West Papua we have initiated a place to learn together about our identity. We created Liru Kunume on 1 December 2023 to deal with the feeling of inferiority that has killed our self-confidence. Liru means learning and Kunume house, learning house. The language belongs to the Lani tribe who inhabited the highlands part of West Papua. We are motivated by Abudllah Öcallan’s perspective on Democratic Confederalism that values differences within communities over nationalism. We believe that by creating a space for dialogue between tribes in West Papua we are able to discover strategies to reclaim our identity, and fight the oppressed systems. The relations between women and men that have been broken by the capitalist systems in West Papua can be restored using the experience in Rojava, that successfully established the Jineolojî academy, which we can use as guidelines to understand the women’s knowledge here in

West Papua.

We believe by creating a safe space to talk about our history, traditions, habits and other local knowledge we can create a unity between peoples. The most important part is reclaiming our destroyed identity as Papuans. Liru Kunume is expected to be a collective house for all tribes to share their knowledge and experiences of violence, to create ideas to re-claim what is ours.