Abstract

After World War II, thousands of Indische people, or people with Eurasian heritage (including Indonesian-Chinese and Moluccans who were linked to the Dutch colonial reign), were moved to the Netherlands from Indonesia (formerly known as the Dutch East Indies) as postcolonial immigrants. Nowadays, they and their descendants have been integrated into Dutch society and Indische culture has become part of everyday life in postcolonial Netherlands. In addition, museums in the twenty-first century started to change their paradigm. In the former colonial country of the Netherlands, city museums began to change their historiography and started representing immigrants and embracing multiculturalism. This study examines three city museums of the Netherlands’ largest cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague. To what extent are the Indische people and culture, as well as the Moluccan people and culture, represented within these museums’ permanent exhibitions? The preliminary results of this research show that the Netherlands’ major city museums tend to focus more on the golden era of the seventeenth century (that of the VOC) while the present day Indische (and Moluccan) stories remain underrepresented.