Remaking the Settler World from Inside the Papuan World: Colonial Consciousness and the Struggle for Reality in West Papua

This paper provides an analysis of Indonesia’s settler colonial project in West Papua, examining its systematic dismantling of Papuan cosmobian societies across eight ontological domains: the physical-material, the biological-organismic, the cultural-mythological, the metaphysical-transcendental, the techno-scientific, the space-time-conscious, the domain of ultimate mystery, and the domain of memory. Grounding its analysis in the Psycho-Cosmocide theoretical framework developed by the author, and drawing on the Lani concept of Inaorak (verified cosmological belonging, from the root words Inawi [home, land, space] and Worak [exist, verified, ontologically valid]) as its primary Indigenous epistemological foundation, the paper argues that Indonesia’s administrative proliferation of provinces, regencies, districts, and village units across West Papua cannot be understood solely as bureaucratic rationalisation: read cumulatively alongside demographic, military, cultural, and epistemic transformation, it also functions as a systematic ontological dissection of Papuan identity, memory, and cosmological jurisdiction. The paper traces the history of naming violence from the Netherlands New Guinea era through to the 2022 creation of five new provinces since 2001 and more than 42 regencies and hundreds of municipalities, documents the demographic function of the transmigration programme, which the framework interprets as a form of demographic warfare, analyses the militarisation of space as ontological enclosure, and examines the instrumentalisation of religious institutions as vectors of cognitive-semiotic erasure. The paper concludes that Papuan resistance lacks not vision, language, or alternative institutions but the one thing the settler programme will never willingly grant: the power to execute an alternative reality. Only a Wonesis—a cosmological return to the self-verified ground of Papuan being—can constitute the beginning of genuine reconstruction.