This article will discuss the Indonesian government’s population resettlement program to explore different ways of looking at the idea of community and community building. Transmigration settlements are both planned and intentional communities. They are planned in accordance to government priorities, which intend them to serve in the building of an imagined community – a unified nation. They are also places where settlers struggle, following their own intent, to build their own personal, everyday vision of community as a place where they feel that they belong. This article will introduce the basic history of the program and its place in the nation building of Indonesia. It will present findings from a year of ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author in transmigration settlements of Northern Sulawesi.