SURIN ISLANDS, Thailand — When Hook was a child, he started his days by jumping off the boat that his family lived on and into the ocean. By age 3, he could already swim and dive in shallow waters. His home was a kabang, a boat, that his family sailed in Thailand’s southern waters. The ocean was his backyard.
Now Hook, whose full name is Suriyan Klathale, lives on land like the rest of his community, a people known as the Moken. The recollections of his childhood, which many Moken of his generation still have, are mostly just memories.
The community, a group of indigenous people from Thailand and Myanmar, came to worldwide attention for its members’ understanding of waves when the Indian Ocean Tsunami struck in December 2004 and killed more than 200,000 people. The few tourists who happened to be on the islands inhabited by the Moken survived because locals knew when they saw the water recede that people needed to get to higher ground.
Today, things are different and changing fast. This once free-sailing people have been grounded by powerful forces of change.
How do you hold onto tradition when everything is working against it?The Moken are one of the various tribal groups and indigenous communities not formally recognized by the Thai government. For years, activists from these communities have tried to push for formal recognition with a bill that would help them hold on to traditions.
But as recently as October, the latest draft of this proposed bill, called the Protection and Promotion of Ethnic Groups’ Way of Life, was tabled by Parliament. The bill would legally guarantee these communities’ basic rights, such as health care, education and land, as well as provide government support to preserve their ethnic identities.
For the Moken, the kabang and their way of living on the ocean are something they hope the law could help preserve. The wooden boat, with a distinctive curve that juts out from its bow and a pavilion set in the middle, is central to the Moken’s identity. “It’s like a lifetime of a person, of a family,” Hook said. “In the past, we lived and died on that boat.”
Multiple generations could live on a kabang, which were much bigger in the past. The parents would stay in the middle of the boat; their married children lived at the front until they built their own boat.
Tat, an elder in the Moken community who uses only one name, said that a Moken became an adult when he could build a boat. It meant he was capable of starting a family.
Today, though, almost no one lives on a boat. Narumon Arunotai, an associate professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok who has worked with the Moken and other indigenous communities for decades, said the shift toward permanent dwelling on land had already started more than 40 years ago.
It was a gradual shift, driven both by stricter border controls as well as the inability to get the wood necessary to build the kabangs. Further, the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 destroyed many of the traditional boats. The change to dwelling on land has happened with other communities known colloquially as sea nomads in Thailand as well.
