The Search for Sama People

note: the following text below is an unfinished writing. i wrote this a couple of days before my scheduled departure. i hope to finish this as soon my hitchhiking ends.

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There is a group of people in the Philippines who is about to be extinct together with the diminishing species of flora and fauna in the archipelago. They are the nomadic sea people.

As I slowly get to know these people, by reading ethnographic accounts and books in athropology, I became personally attached to them. One factor that drove me closer to their heart is the fact that my ancestors from the maternal side were subsistent local fishermen in a remote province of Leyte. I remember once my mother told me that her Father use to chant a prayer mantra asking forgiveness to fishes before going out to the sea for a big catch. Surprisingly, the said practice has a similar tradition with Sama-Dilaut people.

I first read accounts of Sama-Dilaut at the National Public Library of Tokyo. It was summer time and I have just finished reading David Graeber's “Fragments of Anarchist Anthropology” in spring, which inspired me to discover non-authoritarian practices inherent to indigenous knowledge systems. My main objective is to learn from indigenous traditions and practices of nomadic people to be particular. This is where I was brought to the world of Sama-Dilaut.

Sama-Dilaut or commonly known as Bajaus are boat dwelling people, they live on seas most of their time and occasionally dwell on land only to get drinking water, attend gardening and take logs for building boats. Anthropologists argued that these people commonly originated from Semporna in Borneo, but according to Sama-Dilaut's oral-tradition their ancestors once lived in Johore- a place somewhere in the west of Sulu islands. According to their oral story they unconciously stucked their boat poles, to protect themselves from the incoming typhoon, on the back of a sleeping giant sting gray. It awakened the monster and they were brought to unknown seas and never again find the way back to Johore.

Until then Sama-Dilaut people travel back and forth from Borneo to Southern islands of the Philippines and other areas of Southeast Asia where fishing grounds are favorable for them. They don't have a particular territory that could box them inside the boundaries of a State.