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When sea nomads no longer roam

The story of the Sama Dilaut in Rhadem Musawah's documentary

Alessandra Navazio
a story by
Alessandra Navazio
 
 
When sea nomads no longer roam

The Sama Dilaut are a people forced to settle on land due to climate change. The documentary of the same name narrates their struggles with discrimination, the risk of statelessness, and unsustainable agriculture, capturing their voices and hopes for the future

A gentle-featured woman, framed by a burgundy veil and gazing at the ground, begins to sing a lullaby in Filipino. There are no subtitles: she could be speaking of war, the sea, or hope. Behind her, the outlines of boats sway to the rhythm of the waves and her song. After the final note, she looks directly at the camera, a thin veil of emotion adorning her deep, small eyes: many of her family members have fallen ill due to sea pollution.

Rhadem Musawah, an Indigenous gay Muslim documentary filmmaker and human rights activist from the Philippines, member of the PhilSilat Association of the Philippine Olympic Committee, Changemaker Alumnus of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Core Member of Vote Philipinas of the Philippine Electoral Commission and board member of the MUJER LGBT+ organisation. International consultant for humanitarian programmes in the Philippines.

Watch the documentary trailer

This is one of the scenes from the documentary Sama Dilaut, winner of the Toronto International Women Festival (2023) and the International Film Festival The Hague (2023). The film collects the stories of the Sama Dilaut people, once sea nomads, now forced to settle on land due to climate change. Executive producer Rhadem Musawah, along with a team of ten, visited the island of Sibutu in the province of Tawi-Tawi in southern Philippines to meet them.

What about the Sama Dilaut?

The politically correct name is Sama Dilaut, but they are commonly known as Sama Bajao. They are an indigenous people who have lived in the waters of the Sulu Sea between the autonomous Philippine province of Tawi-Tawi, the Philippines, and the Saba Peninsula in Malaysia for hundreds of years. They lived freely in the open sea, moving from one community to another, as they found areas with abundant fish. They danced to the rhythm of the waves and loved living at sea, where their boats transcended being mere vessels to become the very soul of their homes and cultural identity. Their connection to water is very different from that of people living on land: the sea is not just about offering good fish or swimming opportunities but is closely connected to their lives. The most fitting example is the ritual still performed today at the birth of a new human being, who is thrown into the sea and immediately retrieved by the father to ensure that the newborn meets the saltwater from their first breaths and becomes attached to it. In the Sama Dilaut culture, sea is life, and their duty is to protect it because everything else derives from it.

It is sad to see how we are pushing them to the point where they are not only unable to protect the sea but are contributing to its damage.

Could you explain further? How has their relationship with the sea changed? And what kind of impact has climate change had? 

Most of the time, when talking about climate change, people don’t talk about those who live at sea but always about the victims of landslides and floods in cities and on land. The documentary Sama Dilaut aims to tell the story of the impact of climate change on the people of the sea and its visible consequences. The foremost among them: the abandonment of nomadic life on the waters.

To record the documentary, I travelled to Sibutu Island in southern Philippines twice three years ago:the first trip lasted eight days and the second ten. Thanks to Zayda Halun, Director of Oceanology at Mindanao State University in Tawi-Tawi, I discovered that ocean warming is leading to acidification of the waters off Sibutu and damaging the color of coral reefs, causing fish migration. The point is that it is not just the fish forced to migrate, but the Sama Dilaut themselves, who, no longer having access to their primary source of livelihood—fishing—have had to reach the coast and settle on land.

The scarcity of marine products turned them from fishermen into seaweed farmers1, in a daily struggle against poverty.

This is due to a disparity between the earnings of seaweed farmers and the industries benefiting from the cultivated products, because of marketing difficulties and exploitation by intermediaries, such as private companies or small traders. Sibutu Island is far from the main coastal cities, and without a regulated economic infrastructure allowing the Sama Dilaut to sell seaweed directly to buyers, private intermediaries and their abuses have flourished.  Essentially, even if they cultivate 50 kilograms of seaweed over three months, former fishermen can’t earn enough to survive for three days.  Sometimes, to earn income, the Sama Dilaut are forced to introduce chemicals and fertilizers into the sea, polluting not only the seawater but also their connection to it.

Photos of the Sama Dilaut people and the documentary recordings at Tawi-Tawi. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission of the author.

The forced migration of the Sama Dilaut to the coast has highlighted legal issues and a clash between sea rights and land rights. What is the common feeling of this people now?

The Sama Dilaut have always lived in isolation in the sea, and there is an intrinsic difficulty in meeting the mainland both legally and socially. Legally, this people are at risk of statelessness because most Sama Dilaut lack government data or identity documents. In the Philippines, there is an important national law on indigenous peoples2, but it only covers ancestral lands, not waters. This double deficiency (governmental and legislative) has prevented access to justice, basic care, and all those opportunities guaranteed by states that we take for granted. There are people born in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines who do not have the documents to prove their citizenship. Then there is social discrimination, which is a product of all this. The Sama Dilaut are accused of being members of terrorist communities, arrested, and stigmatized. They think they have no say because they are used to being a silent, discreet, and isolated people, where now the struggle for survival prevails. The Sama Dilaut find themselves passively accepting, as if they had no choice but to flow in the water.

Before creating the documentary, I did a lot of research to deepen their relationship with the sea and fishing, their culture and lifestyle, and recent changes, but when I arrived there, I found a completely different scenario. I found that many of the academic research texts I had read were simply based on literature: gathering written information and assembling it according to new perspectives. But there is a huge difference between reading and living the Sama Dilaut.

Being there with them is indeed a very painful experience.  When we filmed the documentary, most of the shots were done from a distance because it seemed right to approach a wounded people with caution. We saw the fear in their eyes as if we were new mainlanders ready to discriminate against them. It is only thanks to the mediation of Rosalyn Dawila, director of the Indigenous Children’s Learning Centers, which organizes education courses for Sama Bajau children, that I and the documentary staff were able to connect with this community as equals. Dawila surprised us during a lesson; we started playing with the children and from there, we met their parents in a true process of getting to know each other.

An excerpt from the documentary Sama Dilaut. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission of the author.

What is the purpose of your documentary?

The Sama Dilaut are on a remote island with no media, phone signal, or television. They are an indigenous community that does not appeal to the mainstream because the Sama Dilaut are not educated, do not have particularly lavish artistic representations, or colorful clothes: it seems they have nothing to offer to mainland people. With this documentary, I want to prove that this is not the case and raise public awareness, so these people are recognized and known, because we, from the mainland, have destroyed the lifestyle of a people and their sea, and it is up to us to do something. During the filming, I glimpsed something small and very similar to hope and the desire for a better future, which I would like to nurture.

Many parents told me they really want the future to be kinder to their children because the world has never been kind to them.

This documentary contributes to that hope.

My role in the documentary was not only that of a producer and assistant director but also as an internal voice from the Philippines that could help manage human resources, human rights, and contacts with the government and military. Two years after the documentary, I had the opportunity to work as a consultant for the FAO—the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization—with the aim of helping Sama Dilaut seaweed farmers and eradicating the use of synthetic fertilizers3. We managed to get funding from the United Nations to provide training on sustainable and responsible seaweed farming, offer small grants for cultivation, and eliminate the problem of private intermediaries by entrusting this role to the provincial government of Tawi Tawi and ministery of Agriculture, Fisheries and Agrarian Reform (MAFAR) which now handle the shipping of seaweed to big cities for buyers. The project lasts three years and is still ongoing.  Earlier this year, there was a memorandum of understanding between the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia in Kuala Lumpur during the World Conference on Statelessness4 to address the situation of the Sama Bajau, and the Philippine government is beginning to count the Sama Bajau community in the Philippine census, which I hope will soon be followed by the issuance of government documents.

 

  1. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, China, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines are the main algae-producing countries worldwide. Seaweed farming is a fast-growing aquaculture sector, with an annual production of about 33 billion tonnes worth USD 11.8 billion. The Philippines, particularly the island province of Tawi-Tawi under the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, contributes significantly to global seaweed production. The Philippines produces 1.3 million tonnes of seaweed annually, 40% of which comes from this region (source: United Nations FAO and Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources under the Philippine Department of Agriculture). ↩︎
  2. Act No. 8371, better known as the Indigenous Peoples’ Right Act (IPRA). The IPRA is a comprehensive piece of legislation incorporating the principles of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention No. 169 on the Rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, which harmonises Philippine standards with international law. ↩︎
  3. Tawi-Tawi in the southern Philippines is rich in seaweed cultivation. The project “farmers-fisherfolks advancement and integration to the resilient value chain in BARMM” (FAIR-VALUE) was launched to empower seaweed farmers to adopt sustainable cultivation and marketing practices to achieve the four objectives. Discover more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBva4dEgrnA ↩︎
  4. The World Conference on Statelessness 2024 was held from 26 to 29 February 2024 at Taylor’s University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Organised by the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI), Nationality for All (NFA), and Development of Human Resources for Rural Areas (DHRRA) Malaysia, the conference brought together over 400 participants with lived and learned experiences of statelessness from around the world to exchange knowledge, perspectives, ideas, and expertise. ↩︎

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