Courtesy of Wengki Ariando
Every year on the 8th of June, World Ocean Day invites us to reflect on the vital role our seas and waterways play in sustaining life on Earth. Yet for most of us, the ocean remains something we observe from a distance, and more recently, a source of anxiety as sea levels rise, waters warm, and marine ecosystems collapse under the pressures of the Anthropocene.
For Indonesia, a nation that defines itself as maritime and archipelagic, this distancing carries a particular irony. Despite the political rhetoric of ‘returning to the sea’ that depicts the ocean as the future of our civilisation, especially during Jokowi’s administration, Indonesia’s relationship with its waters has been largely shaped by an impulse to conquer, control, and extract.
It is within this tension that the stories of Indonesia’s Sea Nomad peoples become both urgent and instructive. Communities such as the Orang Suku Laut and the Sama-Bajau have maintained deep cultural, social, and economic ties to the sea across generations. For them, the sea is home, identity, and livelihood, not something to be managed or tamed. Yet these communities are increasingly marginalised, and their connection to the sea is systematically eroded by economic development, conservation, and paternalistic policies enacted in the name of their own welfare.
In this episode, Dr Clara Siagian speaks with Dr Wengki Ariando, a scholar-activist from the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). He is also part of the Sea Nomads Contact Group, a collective of researchers and community representatives with a mission to translate research into advocacy and activism to secure political recognition for sea nomads in Southeast Asia.
Drawing from more than a decade of working with and learning from sea nomadic communities in Indonesia, Wengki unpacks who the Orang Suku Laut and Sama-Bajau are, the nature of their relationship with the sea, and the very real threats they face today. Crucially, Wengki also introduces the concepts of fluid or rhizomatic territory and Aquapelagos to challenge the dominant, land-based notion of territory as fixed and bounded, in which the ocean and the land are separate entities. For sea nomads, whose lives and identities are organised around movement in water and between water and land, such conventional territorial frameworks render them invisible and rightless. A rhizomatic understanding of territory, by contrast, opens space for recognising the legitimacy of Sea Nomads’ claims to their waters, and with it, the political recognition they are long overdue.
In 2026, the Talking Indonesia podcast is co-hosted by Dr Clara Siagian from the University of College London, Dr Jacqui Baker from Murdoch University, Dr Elisabeth Kramer from the University of New South Wales, Dr Jemma Purdey from the Australia-Indonesia Centre, and Tito Ambyo from RMIT.
