As a child, Hook 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 community, 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, killing 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, this once free-sailing people has been grounded by powerful forces of change.
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 pushed 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 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.”
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 boats. Other communities known as sea nomads have also changed to dwelling on land.
The Moken are scattered across an archipelago of some 800 islands off the coast of Myanmar and Thailand. In the days when they lived on boats, Moken stayed on land only during the monsoon season, which started around May. They’d stay on land until the winds shifted, usually around December, and then return to the sea. For food, they fished and foraged.
Many of the older generation were born on boats and sailed regularly amongst the islands.
“We could move freely without having to worry about the Myanmar government or the Thai government,” said Tawan Klathale, Hook’s older brother, who was born on a boat and is better known by his nickname Ngui. All Moken in Thailand use the surname Klathale, given to the community by one of Thailand’s former queens.
Freedoms began to constrict, and by the time he and Hook were teenagers, they no longer lived on a boat full-time. Moken started settling in the Surin Islands, off the Thai coast, where they had always stayed seasonally. Some came from Myanmar to Thailand, looking for jobs and safety from pirates.
The Surin Islands meanwhile had become a national park in Thailand in 1981, meaning the trees were now protected by law.
