In September 2018, the newly elected governor of NTT province, fulfilling a campaign promise, announced a moratorium on all mining in the province, opening a review of mining contracts issued at the kabupaten level during the previous decade. From 2007 to 2013, hundreds of licenses to mine  manganese and gold in the province had been given out by bupatis, newly empowered by decentralization regulations and the 2009 Mining Law, to allocate concessions (IUP). Many NGOs in the province had hoped that this moratorium would result in the closing of mining as an industry, given their belief that mining was an inappropriate and dangerous industry for the province, consisting of unstable small and relatively heavily populated islands. Before the new Mining Law was introduced in 2009, foreign mining companies hoped the new law would restore the “dependability” and “generosity” of the New Order resource management, however many powerful actors in Indonesia had pressurized the government to implement laws benefitting national interests. Although the new law made some provision for community mining, the rights of communities to reject mining were by no means clear. The implementation of Law no 23 of 2014, however, destabilized some of the certainty of regional and national actors towards the rights to exploitation of natural resources. In this paper I will examine the effect of this law in NTT province and how mining has contributed to shaping a particular idea of what NTT is as a particular place. What has the governor’s new role meant to the communities of NTT, their right to accept, reject, or even mine these resources themselves? I explore the way mining over the past decade in NTT province has contributed to a new sense of the meaning of the province as a particular location of both national and local identity.