Minahasan

The Minahasans are the Austronesian people of the Minahasa peninsula at the northern tip of Sulawesi. They were a cluster of independent warrior communities, the walak, each with its own language; their creation myth recalls a gathering at the Watu Pinawetengan stone that divided the land between them.

They raided and hunted heads, followed the Malesung faith and buried their dead in stone waruga sarcophagi. The coast lay within the sphere of Ternate, yet the Minahasans held out against Islam.

Portuguese and Spanish ships called from the 1520s, and from the late seventeenth century walak chiefs made treaties with the Dutch East India Company. Missionaries made Minahasa one of the Indies' earliest Protestant and school-educated regions; the name Minahasa, meaning become one, first appears in Dutch documents around 1790. Minahasans entered the colonial army, fighting for the Dutch in the Java War of 1825 to 1830.