POHUWATO, Indonesia — Moji Tiok has spent more than a decade casting off into the Gulf of Tomini, where he spends hours hunting with traditional fishing gear among a diminishing pool of octopus south of Indonesia’s Gorontalo province. “I’ve been an octopus fisherman since 2013, and back then it was very hard for us to find large octopus,” Moji Tiok, a member of the Indigenous Bajo seafaring tribe, told Mongabay Indonesia. “What we earn would just about cover our daily needs.” Moji Tiok’s forebears hunted octopus for far longer than a decade. The world’s largest collective of marine nomads has sailed for centuries through this region of Southeast Asia. The Bajo are itinerant mariners hailing from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Venetian explorer Antonio Pigafetta documented the diffuse group of sailors in the early 16th century. Five centuries later, Hollywood director James Cameron would draw inspiration from them for his film Avatar: The Way of Water. In between these events, at the start of the 20th century, the Dutch colonial government in what is now Indonesia corralled Bajo seafarers into a newly created village called Toro Siajeku. That community today is known as Torosiaje, home to Moji Tiok and more than 250 other Bajo octopus hunters. In modern Torosiaje, the Bajo people transitioned from living on boats to stilt houses in the 1930s, but they resisted a government drive to convert them to farmers in the 1980s. Instead, Torosiaje families returned to the water’s edge, where their identity remains anchored…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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