The Minahasa
Sulawesi Utara, Indonesia
This page will give you more information about the
environment,
history, religion and culture of the Minahasan people, who live on the
northeastern peninsula of Sulawesi, in one of the four districts
of the province Sulawesi-Utara.
The capital of Sulawesi-Utara is Manado.
It is reachable by air from Ujung Pandang, Jakarta,
Singapore,
Surabaya, Balikpapan, Ternate, Ambon, Davao and Jayapura. Other
airports
in this province i.e. Gorontalo, Tahuna and Talaud are served mainly by
domestic feather- line traffic.
Map of North-Sulawesi
The Minahasan people
One of the most western oriented people, the hospitable
and open-minded Minahasan people are Christians. Their first contact
with
the Europeans came in the 16th century with the arrival of Spaniards
and
Portuguese spice traders. However, it wasn't until the Dutch landed on
their shores that they became totally Christianized.
The Christian Church in the center of Manado.
At the beginning of the 17th century, the cultures
of
North Celebes were still dominated by the old Austronesian heritage of
insular Southeast Asia. Indian influence had been negligible even in
comparison
with parts of the Philippines - there were no conspicuous Hindu
religious
accretions, no Indic scripts and very few Indian linguistic borrowings.
Islam seems to have reached certain aristocratic groups via Ternate in
the 1560s, but would not become an important part of folk culture in
any
part of North Celebes until the late nineteenth century. Contact with
Spanish
and Portuguese explorers began in the 1520s, and several Jesuit
missionaries
visited the area from 1563 onward, but only on the island of Siau
was a European presence at all sustained in the sixteenth century (De
la
Costa 1958:7-11; Wessels 1933). (Henley 1996:23)
©jwjgendt
2009
