Napu people (Napu: To Napu) is an ethnic group that mostly inhabits Napu Valley in North Lore District, Poso Regency, Central Sulawesi. The Napu people are one of the many sub-ethnic of the Toraja-Koro (obsolete),^[2] more commonly known as sub-ethnic of Lore peoples, which includes the inhabitants of the former Lore Kingdom. Famous and having a reputation in the late 19th century as a people that often fought with other ethnic groups, making Swedish ethnologist, Walter Kaudern, say that they were “the most feared warrior (tribe) in all of Central Sulawesi”.^[3]

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Kaudern in his book states that these highlanders, but do not appear to be a single ethnic group.^[4] Apart from that, the Napu people was very active in carrying out expeditions to plunder throughout the Poso-Toraja region, and brought back a large number of prisoners who became their slaves, who were then married off to some of the natives of Napu Valley. This mixing with foreign slaves eventually led to the assumption that only the Napu noble family was racially pure, and more than fifty percent of the population in the Napu Valley were slaves from other areas.^[5][6][7]

A.C. Kruyt in his book De Bare’e-sprekende Toradja’s van Midden-Celebes together with Nicolaus Adriani, stated that Napu people came from the north, conquering the highland areas by following the direction of the Tambarana River.^[8][5] In linguistics, Adriani considers Napu people to be very clearly different from other Bare’e-speaking Toraja people. He understood the languages of Napu, Behoa, Bada, and Leboni in a group he called Oost-Toradja’sche bergtalen (East Toraja Mountain languages), so that these three languages are considered to be closely related to each other. Although the descendants of Napu people have mixed blood with their slaves who came from the Poso-Toraja region, this does not seem to have affected the character of Napu language.^[9]

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