A cultural movement tracing, documenting, studying, and creating new spaces for the living tradition of Kalelon Makaaruyen in Minahasa.
KAMA is an abbreviation of Kalelon Makaaruyen. In Tontemboan, kama also means hand. The name reflects the movement’s way of working: using our hands to search, record, write, play music, and pass knowledge to another generation.
KAMA emerged in 2011, when increasing numbers of Kalelon Makaaruyen artists were growing old or dying without adequate documentation. Knowledge of the lyrics, guitar patterns, histories, and social contexts was often transmitted only to a small circle of relatives.
From this situation, KAMA began travelling between villages, meeting artists, listening to their accounts, recording performances, transcribing lyrics, and building an archive that could be studied again.
KAMA
Hands Working for Memory
Documentation is not simply about preserving an old sound. It protects the relationships connecting artists, families, villages, languages, and future generations.
A Minahasan Living Tradition
Kalelon and Makaaruyen
Kalelon and Makaaruyen are names used across different parts of Minahasa. Kalelon is more commonly used in southern Minahasa, while Makaaruyen is widely used in other areas.
Both are connected to traditions of verse and song carrying prayers, longing, lamentation, counsel, affection for family and homeland, reverence for nature, and relationships between human beings and the Creator.
The tradition has continued to change. Verses that once lived within ritual and communal settings later encountered the guitar, whistling techniques, and other musical forms. These transformations show that tradition is not confined to the past; it continues to converse with its time.
More Than Music
Kalelon Makaaruyen is an oral archive. Its verses hold Minahasan ways of understanding affection, loss, labour, family, land, faith, and communal life.
Because it is transmitted through listening, memory, and practice, its continuity depends on direct relationships between those who carry the knowledge and those willing to learn.
Methods
Tracing, Documentation, and Study
Meeting Artists
KAMA visits villages and meets singers, guitarists, families, and others who carry knowledge of Kalelon Makaaruyen.
Building an Archive
Performances, lyrics, interviews, photographs, and artists’ life stories are documented through writing, audio, and video.
Opening Access
Documentation is shared through social media and YouTube so it can be found by families, younger generations, researchers, and Minahasan communities in different places.
Audiovisual Archive
The Artists’ Voices
KAMA records artists within their own living environments: homes, gardens, villages, and the places where knowledge is transmitted. The camera preserves voices, faces, guitar techniques, lyrics, and the atmosphere surrounding a performance.
Each recording is also a space for conversation. Artists do not only perform their verses; they speak about experience, kinship, artistic journeys, and the memories living behind the songs.
Kalelon Makaaruyen documentation with artists from Sonder.
Kalelon from Ro’ong Tondei, South Minahasa.
Performance Spaces
Returning the Tradition to Its Public
KAMA’s work does not end with documentation. As more artists were located and recorded, it became necessary to create spaces where they could perform, meet one another, and receive recognition.
Kalelon Makaaruyen festivals and performances bring senior artists, younger players, cultural communities, and audiences together. In these spaces, the tradition is not only stored as an archive; it is practised again in front of its own public.
KAMA has also participated in cultural events across Minahasa, bringing Kalelon Makaaruyen into conversation with poetry, film, Indigenous movements, and contemporary musical forms.
KAMA creates performance spaces where Kalelon Makaaruyen can return to its public and encounter other artistic forms.
KAMA as a Band
A Tradition Performed Again
KAMA also developed as a band. This form emerged from a desire to move Kalelon Makaaruyen beyond the archive and return it to audiences as a living musical experience.
In performance, KAMA plays Kalelon Makaaruyen verses and melodies while bringing them into conversation with the musical experiences of its members. The work does not seek to replace traditional artists. It opens another path through which younger generations can hear, study, and build relationships with the tradition.
As a band, KAMA has performed in cultural spaces, festivals, solidarity events, and community gatherings. Performance becomes another way of caring for the archive: recorded music is played again, interpreted, and shared with a public.
Kalelon Makaaruyen Songs for Lombok, Manado, 7 August 2018.
Culture and Solidarity
Songs for Lombok
In 2018, KAMA, AMAN North Sulawesi, and a network of communities organised Kalelon Makaaruyen Songs for Lombok following the earthquake in West Nusa Tenggara.
Kalelon Makaaruyen verses carrying prayer, longing, lamentation, and concern for others became a language of solidarity. Music, poetry performances, book sales, and a donation space connected humanitarian work with cultural expression.
Transmission
The Home and Family as a School
Knowledge of Kalelon Makaaruyen is not always passed through schools or formal arts institutions. Many people learn from grandparents, parents, siblings, relatives, and artists living in their villages.
KAMA therefore recognises the home and family as important learning spaces. A child can learn to sing, understand a verse, play the guitar, or master a whistling technique by watching, listening, and practising with the people closest to them.
This form of transmission does not separate art from life. Music is learned together with language, kinship, village memory, and ways of living as Tou Minahasa.
A Living Tradition
KAMA does not aim to freeze Kalelon Makaaruyen as an object from the past. The work protects its foundations while allowing younger generations to learn, interpret, perform, and develop it.
Book
The Documentation Journey Became a Book
I have developed my long journey of tracing and documenting Kalelon Makaaruyen into a book titled Kalelon Makaaruyen: Ingatan, Rindu, dan Jalan Pulang Tou Minahasa.
The book grew from encounters with artists, families, villages, verses, and memories gathered throughout the documentation process. It considers not only the musical form, but also intergenerational relationships, the lives of the singers, and the Tou Minahasa knowledge living within Kalelon Makaaruyen.
One part of this documentation journey took place in the gardens of Kaima, below Mount Klabat. Families from Ampreng in Langowan cultivated the land, stayed in garden shelters, and returned to Ampreng every Saturday. During the day, the farmers supported one another through sumbembong and practised Mangaran while planting and harvesting—an almost-lost Langowan tradition.
After the day’s work, the farmers gathered in Om Fangki Rantung’s garden shelter to talk, eat, drink, sing, and perform Kalelon Makaaruyen into the night. Experiences such as this show that Kalelon Makaaruyen does not live only on a stage. It remains embedded in labour, family life, gardens, and relationships between people.
Through this book, KAMA’s work extends beyond video and the digital archive. The documentation journey also becomes a written space connecting personal experience, cultural work, and the effort to carry Kalelon Makaaruyen knowledge into the next generation.
My Role
My Involvement
I began tracing and documenting Kalelon Makaaruyen in 2011 after seeing artists die one by one while their lyrics, playing techniques, and personal histories remained insufficiently documented.
Together with friends in the Mawale Movement cultural network, this work developed into KAMA. I have been involved in meeting artists, recording videos, documenting lyrics, writing profiles, developing the digital archive, organising performances, and building relationships with communities and younger generations.
For me, Kalelon Makaaruyen is not simply music that needs to be preserved. It is a pathway for relearning how to be Minahasan through sound, language, family, memory, and knowledge living within the village.
Working Together
Documentation, Performance, and Collaboration
KAMA welcomes work involving documentation, research, performances, archive screenings, intergenerational workshops, publications, and collaborations with artists, families, villages, cultural communities, universities, and Indigenous organisations.
To share an archive, suggest an artist who should be documented, or discuss a collaboration, please get in touch.