The Moken, a group of indigenous people from Thailand and Myanmar, once sailed freely between the archipelago of 800 islands off the coast of the two countries. Colloquially known as sea nomads, they lived aboard boats called kabangs for months at a time, and got sustenance from the sea.
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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.”
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.
To make a kabang, one needs a good strong tree, at least 1 meter wide and 10 meters tall. The trunk needs to be straight and be free of defects. Over the course of months, men of the community would dig out the trunk and carve it into a boat’s hull, while also using fire to make the wood pliable and stretch it out. It was a communal thing, involving up to 10 people.
Today, the village in Surin only has one kabang, built by Tat and used mostly to ferry tourists and take children out on day trips. Hook, who lives on the mainland in Thailand, also has a kabang built with the funding of a private donor from Norway after a filmmakerabout his journey to make one such boat in 2014. But his kabang is built with planks of wood, rather than a single hollowed out tree.
Today, young Moken are more worried about their livelihoods and finding jobs than how to build a boat. Most only make money during Thailand’s peak tourist season when the national park is open to tourists, from November to April, and have to live on that money for the rest of the year.
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