Minahasan indigenous perspectives on place planning and management : tracing the indigenous culture through the lens of local wisdom

Indigenous cultures draw upon many thousands of years of residency and environmental adaptation offering unique knowledge resources to better understand our landscapes and environment. The Minahasan society, on the island of Sulawesi in the Indonesian archipelago, is one such Indigenous community. The Minahasan are the Indigenous community of northern Sulawesi, before the Portuguese and Dutch 1500-1900 colonization of this island, and the later nationalist cultural assimilation following post Indonesian independence. Thus, some 500 years of post-European contact and management can be contrasted against over I 00,000 years of Minahasan society. Further, the majority of this colonisation has been focused upon the coastal fringes resulting in a relatively intact Minahasan cultural landscape within the interior of northern Sulawesi focused upon the Tondano Lake catchment. This paper considers the importance of the Minahasan-formed cultural landscape, its importance to this culture, and the role and influence it continues to have in settlement formation and planning in northern Sulawesi despite conventional Indonesian and Western-informed sustainable urban and regional planning traditions and knowledge. It draws upon intensive qualitative research using 14 different villages, to analyse and compare local knowledge and land-relationships developed by the respective communities to manage and curate their unique characteristics as well as ensuring adaption without compromising their cultural, social and economic values. The research embodies this ethnoecological information in seeking to analyse historical and contemporary land use planning systems, and to offer a future planning perspective that will respect and endure this relationship and environmental management regime.