Indo person here -
I appreciate the sharing of these stories, but I perceive this podcast as very biased and not so informative, as it feels based in one-sided emotion. Don’t get me wrong - I offer these critiques out of a love for our people; because I am in search of a more thorough truth for the Indo people, I want our story tellers to give a more honest version that might sometimes paint the Dutch in a non ideal light. I want this so that we can heal from our traumas.
Yes, the Indo people face a unique and challenging circumstance, and they have experienced a lot of trauma that is now being passed down generation to generation. They deserve empathy with what they have gone through. (Example: Having been forced out of their homeland, they have no concrete home and they do not fit in anywhere and are often separated from one another in diaspora, in order to assimilate.) But this podcast does not give any context about why the Indonesian people needed to seek independence and move away from being a colonized land.
The narrator often relays that the Dutch and Indos were being targeted “simply because of the color of their skin” but that is no simple thing. With heritage comes a complex history and political context. It is not normal or automatically nice or good to colonize a land and extracted from it. It is not normal and ok that the Dutch actively took over the country. Therefore, it is political to be Dutch in Indonesia at the time.
Unfortunately, the Indos were caught in the middle, with no option to be their complex selves. They had to choose a side in order to survive. Some Indos assimilated back into Indonesian society. Some assimilated into western societies. We cannot see Indos as solely the people who assimilated into western society - that would be an incomplete picture of our people.
What I want is a gentle, honest, comprehensive story about our people that respects Indonesia’s necessary journey of decolonization while centering and validating the unique experience of the Indo people. How did we get here, and why did our ancestors make their decisions?
