I am a PhD candidate working on a descriptive grammar of Mentawai, a language spoken on an island chain of the same name off the coast of West Sumatra in Indonesia. The language has around 64,000 daily speakers and is used in a comparatively wide set of domains compared to other Indonesian regional languages, it is however poorly documented at current. My thesis aims to describe the grammar of the language within typological and historical context, hopefully enabling its more accurate classification within the Austronesian language family. I also hope to document information about Mentawai life, society, culture, and thought throughout the course of my PhD.