Maden

The Maden are the indigenous islanders of Salawati, a large Raja Ampat island off the Bird's Head Peninsula of New Guinea. Maden, or Madin, was their Moi neighbours' name for the people of Sakabu village, and it has since fallen out of use.

Their Salawati language, once also called Maden, is an Austronesian tongue of the Halmahera Sea branch, closely related to Ma'ya and marked by a Papuan substratum; it was Salawati's common speech before Ma'ya rajas arrived from Waigeo. Local memory recalls King Tusan, a fun, who ruled before the Raja Ampat order.

Islam reached the archipelago in the fifteenth century, the Portuguese Jorge de Menezes sighted the Raja Ampat islands in 1526, and from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Salawati kingdom at Samate stood under Tidore's sway, later passing to the Dutch with the other Moluccan claims.