« The ‘problem of the Indio’ is a settler predicament: Sophia Martínez Abbud, ‘”Playing Latinx” as Settler-Colonial Reenactment’, MELUS, 2026

Settler colonialism as psycho-cosmocide? Yamin Kogoya, ‘Remaking the Settler World from Inside the Papuan World: Colonial Consciousness and the Struggle for Reality in West Papua’, Kurumbi Wone Working Paper Series, 13, 2026

02Jun26

Abstract: This paper provides an analysis of Indonesia’s settler colonial project in West Papua, examining its systematic dismantling of Papuan cosmobian societies across eight ontological domains: the physicalmaterial, the biological-organismic, the cultural-mythological, the metaphysical-transcendental, the techno-scientific, the space-time-conscious, the domain of ultimate mystery, and the domain of memory. Grounding its analysis in the Psycho-Cosmocide theoretical framework developed by the author, and drawing on the Lani concept of Inaorak (verified cosmological belonging, from root word Inawi [home, land, space] and Worak [exist, verified, ontologically valid]) as its primary indigenous epistemological foundation, the paper argues that Indonesia’s administrative proliferation of provinces, regencies, districts, and village units across West Papua constitutes not a bureaucratic rationalisation but a systematic ontological dissection of Papuan identity, memory, and cosmological jurisdiction. The paper traces the history of naming violence from the Netherlands New Guinea era through to the 2022 creation of four new provinces and the now sixty-plus administrative units, documents the function of the transmigration programme as demographic warfare, analyses the militarisation of space as ontological enclosure, and examines the instrumentalisation of religious institutions as vectors of cognitive-semiotic erasure. The paper concludes that Papuan resistance lacks not vision, language, or alternative institutions but the one thing the settler programme will never willingly grant: the power to execute an alternative reality. Only a Wonesis—a cosmological return to the self-verified ground of Papuan being—can constitute the beginning of genuine reconstruction.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed