MT Analysis: The Indo People’s Quest to Belong

JAKARTA - The year was 1957, and Priscilla McMullen’s father was asked to choose. 

A man of German and Dutch descent, he could become Indonesian fully and officially or he could leave for the Netherlands. President Sukarno had finally drawn a line on the sand that the Europeans and mixed-heritage people who had helped build the country’s roads and dams and power grids would have to make a choice. Become Indonesian citizens, or leave.

In Java, he was the head of the hydroelectric projects in Java at Algemeene Nederlandsch - Indische Electriciteits - Maatschappij (ANIEM), an electricity company that powered Central and East Java. It belonged to the Dutch colonial government until Indonesia nationalized it in the early ‘50s. 

That was sixty-nine years ago, and he ended up choosing the latter despite the fact that he was born in Yogyakarta in 1907. 

Priscilla recalls that time and remembers that his father wanted to stay and be a warga negara, “But all my brothers and sisters, there were six of them, were already in the Netherlands going to school and even starting their lives there.”

“And they said, “We’re not going back, Pa, because there’s no future for us in Indonesia.”

The Ghost of Dutch East Indies

The word “Indo,” Priscilla is careful to explain, does not simply mean “Indonesian.” It refers specifically to people of mixed Indonesian and European heritage, the descendants of the colonial encounter that began when the Portuguese, Dutch, Germans, French, and others arrived in the archipelago in the 1600s. 

Not all Indos are Dutch as the European side of the family could come from anywhere. What they share is that their roots, whatever their nationality today, are in the former Dutch East Indies.

Born in Jakarta in 1949, Priscilla’s family lived through the bloody years of “Bersiap,” which translates roughly as "be prepared" and refers to the violent revolutionary period that followed the Japanese surrender in August 1945. Indonesian nationalists, many of them young, moved through the archipelago in a wave of killings and attacks directed largely at the Dutch colonial population and the Indos. The chaos was extreme with estimates of the dead running into the tens of thousands.

Priscilla’s grandfather was killed by the Pelopor, the Indonesian revolutionary youth militia. Her eight-year-old sister died during the Bersiap. Her father was imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II. Her mother, Ambonese and dark-skinned, had been hunted during the Japanese occupation because her children had light hair and light eyes. The family was pursued from multiple directions across a decade.

“My parents could not speak about that time,” Priscilla says. “It hurt so bad.”

In Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 14 (2012), American historian William H. Frederick stated that the killing of thousands of Dutch people during Bersiap is best defined as “ethnic cleansing” and he called it a case of “postcolonial memory loss” by Dutch authorities. 

Dutch newspapers including Het Dagblad, De Locomotief, and Nieuwe Courant document murders, body discoveries, and justice trials of the Bersiap victims between 1947 and the early 1950s. The killings and the disappearances were often unresolved for years.

De Locomotief, for example, reports a series of murders committed during the Bersiap period in its 16 August 1946 edition. One man, a “Mr. Grootenboer,” was abducted from his home and “his horribly mutilated body was later found” in Kwitang in the Central Jakarta area. 

That same morning, a “Mr. Bekker” was also taken from his home, along with his son-in-law “Mr. Nieuwentooom,” but both were later freed by the British. However, Bekker’s sons, “Frits” and “Frans,” were killed in separate attacks. The newspaper also recounts the execution of a man with a Javanese name, Mr. Tjiptohardjo, an Indo-European owner of the restaurant “Asia Raja,” who was killed on suspicion of being an “enemy’s spy.”

That goes on, and Jakarta has never officially recognized the Bersiap violence. Roughly 30,000 Dutch and Dutch-Indo were murdered, and that number still doesn’t include ethnic Chinese, Ambonese, and the noble “Ningrat” Javanese.

"Warehoused" in the Homeland

After the 1949 Dutch–Indonesian Round Table Conference in The Hague, where the Netherlands formally recognized Indonesia’s sovereignty, the fate of hundreds of thousands was distilled into a legal clause.

Under the Toescheidingsovereenkomst, residents of the former Dutch East Indies had to choose between Indonesian or Dutch nationality, which triggered waves of “repatriation.” Then, in 1961, as tensions between Indonesia and Netherlands intensified over New Guinea, a new wave of spijtoptanten (regretters) revered their earlier decision and left for Europe.

“The vast majority of those who had returned from the Netherlands came because they saw no future for their children in Indonesia,” newspaper Het Vrije Volk wrote in its January 13, 1965 edition. “A large proportion of the breadwinners stated that they had not been able to manage mentally and financially in Indonesia.”

So for many Indo families who chose (or were forced) to leave Indonesia in the 1950s, arrival in the Netherlands felt, as Priscilla puts it, like being “warehoused.”

“The Netherlands was just getting off their knees from World War II; they didn’t know what to do with all these white men bringing home all their brown kids and wives. So they just "warehoused" us, as they called it,” she describes, speaking from her Boston home. 

“Warehoused” was indeed the correct term. For example, on November 7, 1958, the regional daily Leeuwarder Courant reported that more than 16,000 repatriates were living in 391 state-contracted boarding houses across the Netherlands. They often lived in severely cramped and exploitative housing conditions, paid by the Dutch government. 

And even long before waves of patriation hit, isolation still did happen. In Haarlem, former colonial employees formed an Indische association after describing their postwar lives in the Netherlands as “een leeg, eentonig, een geïsoleerd bestaan” or “an empty, monotonous and isolated existence.”

Once labelled “import Nederlanders” in the Indies, they found themselves treated as outsiders again upon return. That was described by De Locomotief on December 8, 1933.

Still, that took a toll on her father. He ended up working in a bicycle saddle factory after Priscilla’s family returned to the Netherlands in 1957, breaking physically and mentally because the Dutch society did not recognize his status, including his professional engineering. 

“He decided to take us to the United States in 1960,” Priscilla remembers. “He said, "I'm not staying here," and took us to the United States.”

That pattern appears in many Indo stories in the United States, where many live in sunny states like California and Florida, perhaps drawn by climates similar to the tropical country they once left. They are often called the “Amerindos,” a diaspora of a diaspora.

A 2022 study published in the Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia found that many Amerindos report persistent anxiety, mistrust, and patterns of emotional invalidation across generations. Cultural practices such as food (rijsttafel), music (keroncong), and community gatherings persist across generations, even as the Dutch language and detailed family histories are less frequently passed on to younger generations.

A Pilot’s Return

Ami Emanuel has a story that moves in the opposite direction, and it is just as revealing.

Now 95 years old and a former KLM Chief Pilot, he was born in Surabaya in 1931. At 16, he was already in the Netherlands, the minimum age to join a Dutch football club, and had become a member of the junior team at HFC Haarlem, where he trained with Kick Smit, a former Dutch national team player with 29 national caps and 26 goals.

He came back to Bogor in early 1948, studying at the local Hoogere Burgerschool (HBS) and quickly joining Buitenzorgse Boys, a school-based club known around town simply as "BéBé." They started in the second division and were promoted after the first year.

Then, in January 1950, something happened that Ami still finds remarkable when he thinks about it. The presidents of several Bogor clubs, including Sangkuriang, Chung Hwa, and Gelora, asked him to travel to Jakarta to seek government authorization to establish a new local football association. 

He went, met with the official appointed by President Sukarno, made his case, and received the approval. The Perserikatan Sepakbola Bogor, or PSB, was born.

But nobody in that room had raised the question of whether Ami was Indonesian. Not the club presidents who sent him, and not the Sukarno-appointed official who granted the authorization, and not Ami himself.

“Strange enough nobody, neither myself nor the person authorized by President Soekarno, realized that I was not of Indonesian nationality,” he recalls.

After finishing his HBS exams in June 1951, Ami joined the KLM flying school in the Netherlands. He was lucky, he says, to go alongside the first group of student pilots training for Garuda Indonesia, then still known as Garuda Indonesian Airways (GIA).

Their names were Ghazali Sindhi Surataruna, Eddy Tumbelaka, Permadipura, Dendadipura, Jopi Dion, and Mincke Lumanauw. A friendship began that day that would last the rest of their working lives and beyond.

Decades later, when Ami was a 747 chief pilot at KLM's head office in Amstelveen, his old Garuda counterparts would visit him there. Roekanto Djokomono, who had risen to general manager of Garuda's flight operations, and Sumedi, chief of technical services, came to his office. 

When Ami brought his four granddaughters to Indonesia in 2007, Roekanto, Sumedi, and vice-president Ghazali organized a formal reception at Menteng to thank him for the decades of friendship and support.

“A friendship that stayed all those years till the last of them died some three years ago,” he recalls. “I am grateful to have had the opportunity to do something back to the country.”

What Being an Indo Means

Both Priscilla and Ami are part of a generation determined to preserve Indo identity. Priscilla now chairs The Indo Project, a non-governmental organization that preserves and celebrates that in-between culture of the Indo-Europeans. 

“I’m old, I don’t have much left. And what I wanna leave behind is this, The Indo Project,” she says, voice plain and urgent. She wants to make sure the history does not disappear into silence the way it disappeared inside her parents, who could not speak about the people they had lost and the world they had left.

In Holland, Priscilla says, Indos were used to downplay their Indonesian side. They kept their heads low, learned to be “nederig” or “compliant.” “They still feel that 'second class' thing,” Priscilla says of that generation. “That white is superior. That you always have to be like the white people.”

This emotional withholding, she explains, is how historical trauma usually moves through generations. The first generation cannot speak about it, and the second generation grows up knowing something terrible happened but not knowing the what’s and the why’s. By the third and fourth generation, the pain has faded into curiosity.

They grew up in a Netherlands where Indonesian food is on every corner, where the Pasar Malam is loud and regular on the weekend nights, where having Indonesian roots is something to mention with interest at a dinner party rather than hide. 

“They take pride in their roots,” Priscilla says of her own children, who are in their forties. “They kind of take pride in their ancestry being Indonesian.”

“We Indos are people shaped by the convergence of two cultures,” she says further. “And what's very important is that their roots are in the former Dutch East Indies. Their colonial roots are there.”

The August 15 Herdenking, held at the Indisch Monument in The Hague and at Dam Square in Amsterdam, is where this history is honored. Priscilla flies to the Netherlands each August specifically to take part. Last year, the Dutch King spoke at the evening ceremony. It is, she says, a very big event.

“Build a bridge,” Priscilla says. “Because they don't have all that baggage, all the pain. No. They just know about Pasar Malams and the Herdenking and the good food.”

That, she seems to suggest, is not the worst place to start.