Chapter XIII

A Tsunami of Change

Every culture has its creation story, and the Haida version eerily mirrors the opening of the Bible in Genesis 1: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” The Haida legend, however, is considerably more intriguing in describing how light came to be.

No anthropomorphic deity exists in Haida culture—just Raven, the trickster. A story older than the Bible and carefully handed down through oral rather than written tradition tells of Raven transforming himself into a spruce needle and falling from a tree branch into the water just as a chief’s daughter was about to take a drink at a stream. The princess inadvertently swallowed the spruce needle and became pregnant with Raven in human form. As a child crying in the chief’s house because he was not allowed to play with a bentwood cedar box containing light, Raven one day grew impatient, transformed back into his bird form and stole the light from the box. It is said that Raven was white at the time but had eaten so much of the chief’s food he became temporarily stuck in the smoke hole in the roof of the longhouse during his escape and his feathers turned black from the smoke and soot. Freed at last, he flew into the dark heavens, releasing the sun, the moon and the stars. Let there be light … and there was light.

Eons of time later and after more than two centuries of colonization, Haida leaders gathered around a bentwood cedar box—much like the one from which Raven stole the light—removed the lid and shouted into it, “Queen Charlotte Islands.” The lid was quickly replaced and tied with cedar-bark rope so the name could not escape as all present announced, “The real name is Haida Gwaii,” meaning Islands of the People. The box was ceremoniously given to outgoing BC Premier Gordon Campbell, who became Canada’s representative in England, to present to Queen Elizabeth. Through this simple but brilliant cultural act, the Haida returned the name bestowed on their isles in 1787 by Captain George Dixon, who was the first European to circumnavigate the archipelago (with the likely exception of Sir Francis Drake more than two centuries earlier) and who named the islands after his ship and queen—the wife of King George III. The governments of Canada and British Columbia had no choice now but to change the name on every map, chart, news broadcast and weather report from that day forward. The Queen Charlotte Islands had been symbolically stripped of their colonial yoke; they would henceforth be called Haida Gwaii.

And so it was in the aftermath of the Moresby campaign that a renewed nation emerged. Guujaaw told me that his uncle, Percy Williams, to whom I had presented the eagle during my kayak journey in 1973, was deeply moved by the name change. “Uncle Percy said that when he heard that the name was Haida Gwaii a tear welled up in his eyes, a lump in his throat. All these years in politics he said he remained emotionally detached, determined that emotion was for the family, but he said he thought back to the days when they had no influence over anything—when it was the white man’s world.”

Guujaaw had also once written to me: “Consider when you came. Our people—the island people, for that matter, had nothing to say about anything; the Haida people had no influence over anything.”

All of that changed with the 1985 Lyell Island blockade and the signing of the Gwaii Haanas Agreement in 1993. The fact that a Haida name was used to designate Western Canada’s most significant national park reserve and Haida heritage site spoke volumes about who was now calling the shots. I can recall a meeting with Parks Canada I was asked to attend with Guujaaw and Diane Brown, both champions of Haida rights and cultural identity. The meeting was to discuss the possibility of a new Rediscovery camp for Swan Bay, in the very heart of the national park reserve. “You can’t put a Rediscovery camp at that site,” the Parks Canada official said with authority. “Lots of kayakers will want to use Swan Bay for camping.”

Like Bill Reid, Guujaaw was inspired by the ancient poles carved by his ancestors and found at abandoned Haida village sites. Richard Krieger photo

“Well, they’re not going to be camping in Swan Bay when our kids are there,” Diane responded even more firmly, with the authority of a protective mother. “Who knows who these people might be—axe murderers or Catholic priests?”

Asserting Haida rights was the name of the game now and with no legal basis to fall back on, the province of BC was at a loss over what to do with this unprecedented assertiveness. A treaty, a conquest or a purchase of Haida territory had never before existed so there was no legal leg for the province to stand on in claiming these isles, even under British law. The fact that Haida Gwaii, the most isolated archipelago in Canada, had no competing territorial claims from neighbouring tribes gave it an unusually strong and unique position in the land claims and title debates raging across the province. Every time the Haida asserted their rights to the land and surrounding waters, they threw a monkey wrench into the workings of government. Something had to be done, as BC was courting foreign investments, especially from China, and everything remained uncertain when title questions were unresolved.

In 2009 the BC government signed a reconciliation agreement with the Haida Nation designed to create greater certainty in land-use decisions, and as Guujaaw said, to “lay the groundwork for an era of peace.” Through shared decision-making, revenue sharing and responsible economic and sustainable development, it was hoped that this agreement would increase prosperity for both the province and the Islands. It included $10 million for the Haida Nation to buy out forest tenures and further committed to renaming the Queen Charlotte Islands as Haida Gwaii. This was to be a one-of-a-kind structure for shared decision-making in key strategic areas, but as Guujaaw said later, “The reconciliation agreement was to be an anomaly, but since the Tsilhqot’in agreement, the Crown thinks it looks pretty good.” In 2014 the BC Supreme Court, in a unanimous ruling, broke the long stalemate on the title question in British Columbia by recognizing the Tsilhqot’in Nation’s rights to their traditional lands. Everything was now up for grabs.

When asked what he considered to be the greatest achievements of the Haida Nation since the Gwaii Haanas decision and the reconciliation agreement, Guujaaw responded, “We’ve got lots of influence now, but we’re still fighting DFO [federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans], Big Oil is back … people are inspired to fight pipelines but all in the context of failing marine and terrestrial ecosystems … the effects are reaching every part of the globe … Fukushima, plastic, oil, sky … Yet I would never say that the battles were for naught, as by now all of the good cedar would be gone, pretty much all of the natural world would be altered forever. The fights to keep the life-support systems going are still worth the fight. I still enjoy the fight and I’m still in.”

The sweeping changes on Haida Gwaii were unprecedented in Canadian history and they continue to carve out a new, more equitable and mutually respectful relationship between First Peoples and the nation of immigrants that followed. Canada is the second-largest nation on earth in land mass with the lowest population density for area, blessed with abundant natural resources and a history of resolving conflicts through dialogue and negotiations rather than grabbing the gun like her sister nation to the south. There’s probably no country in the world in a better position to recognize the land rights of its aboriginal inhabitants and right historical injustices than Canada.

While a tsunami of change was sweeping over Haida Gwaii, I was being kept abreast of it from afar. Guujaaw, a clever statesman, likes to bounce ideas and initiatives off people he trusts before implementing them; I guess I was one of those people. While I was spending half of each year living in Asia, working on Indigenous rights issues with the Penan, Mentawai and Moken, the Haida Gwaii grapevine continued to keep me informed of the Islands’ affairs, and I religiously returned there every summer to visit my adopted family and friends.

I had stubbed my toe on Thailand in the course of my travels and, like many others, fell in love with the happy-go-lucky and nonjudgmental nature of these largely Buddhist people. An opportunity presented itself to build a small house for myself as part of a family-run beach bungalow project in Krabi province, long before this stunning seascape region was on the tourism radar. Dawn of Happiness Beach Resort was named after the first Thai kingdom of Sukhothai. It was far from a resort; just a collection of twelve bamboo-walled and thatched-roof bungalows set on an isolated beach, but it had an understated elegance and a family feel to it that attracted high-end tourists who could afford better. Here I had a home base for my Asian travels for more than a decade, and during that time the kingdom inspired me to write several more books: Reefs to Rainforests, Mangroves to Mountains: A Guide to South Thailand’s Natural Wonders; Waterfalls & Gibbon Calls: Exploring Khao Sok National Park; and Krabi: Caught in the Spell.

As far as the bungalow business went, I summed up my experience in the Krabi book with the observation, “I learned that almost any foreigner can end up with a small fortune in Thailand, especially if they start out with a large one.”

As a business, Dawn of Happiness could never really support itself, so I began offering our guests ecotours in the surrounding area to help make ends meet. An international schoolteacher from the Philippines who came on one of these trips liked my rap well enough to go back to the Manila head office of the East Asia Regional Council of Overseas Schools (EARCOS), telling Dr. Richard Krajczar, the executive director, that I should be a keynote speaker at their next conference in Shanghai. I knew nothing about international schools at the time and was surprised to find myself sharing the keynote podium with two illustrious speakers: Robert Hass, the US poet laureate in 1995–97, and Dr. Jane Goodall, the chimpanzee researcher with the National Geographic Society. Conference delegates must surely have wondered, who the hell is Thom Henley?

When I had the opportunity to meet Robert Hass prior to his delivering of the opening keynote, I could see that he was a kindred spirit and true nature lover. I was scheduled to deliver the morning keynote on the second day, while Jane Goodall, who had not yet arrived, was to do the closing keynote on day three.

In all the lectures I gave in the years following the Penan world tour, I never missed an opportunity to bring their plight to public attention. I also spoke about Rediscovery and my Haida Gwaii experiences. The headmasters and administrators from the top schools in Asia seemed like a good audience to possibly effect change. Years earlier, David Suzuki had told me that if you want to get your audience’s attention, “shock them”—and I took him up on that advice in Shanghai.

In closing my slide lecture, I told the distinguished audience of international school administrators that Pol Pot had been described by every one of his teachers as “a lovely child.” He had received all of his formal education at an international school in Paris before returning to Cambodia to enact the greatest genocide since the Holocaust—the systematic extermination of three million people. And yet there is no proof that Pol Pot killed anyone. The Killing Fields are filled with the bones of victims with skulls smashed in by farming hoes to save money on bullets. It was all done by schoolchildren doing what they were told to do: obey those in authority.

In closing my Shanghai slide lecture, I showed pictures I had taken a year earlier of a map of Cambodia made out of human skulls, with images of twelve innocent-looking boys and twelve cherub-faced girls bordering both sides, displayed at the end of the corridor of a high school that is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. My Khmer guide, a woman who was the sole survivor in her family following the evacuation and execution of Phnom Penh’s educated “elite,” had taken me on a tour through classrooms where torture equipment still sat atop blood-stained floors, and black-and-white photos of thousands of victims lined the walls, each with a serial number. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge kept detailed photographic records of the more than twenty thousand men, women and children they tortured at this school prior to their executions. It was the end of the tour and I was too shell-shocked to look at the map of Cambodia made of human skulls. Instead, my eyes were drawn to the eyes of the children bordering the map; they were as sweet and innocent as any child’s eyes one might ever gaze into. “They don’t have numbers on their photos,” I said to my guide. “Were they the last to be executed?”

She looked at me in disbelief and replied, “They were the torturers. They were the executioners.”

I was struck numb, as was my audience in Shanghai when I told this story to the assembled school headmasters and showed slides of these same Khmer children. I closed my comments with the words, “If children are such putty in our hands that we can take them to these depths of horror, imagine the potential in the other direction.” I closed the slide show with reflective music and close-ups of children’s faces—Penan, Haida, Khmer. There was not a dry eye in the house after my talk, I was told later, so the lighting crew kept the house lights off to give the assembly a moment of privacy. God forbid headmasters ever be seen to show emotion. Far from applause at the end of my talk, there was a deathly silence and I felt certain that I had probably delivered my first and last keynote at an international school conference.

As the lights slowly rose an older woman walked up onstage, burrowed her head in my shoulder and started whimpering. My God, I thought, this is becoming a total disaster.

“Pat me on the head,” the grey-haired lady whispered in my ear.

“What?” I asked in disbelief.

“Pat me on the head,” she repeated. I did as I was instructed until the room was fully illuminated again.

Going to the microphone, the woman said, “That is how a female chimp greets a male she admires.” The audience rose to a standing ovation as I beheld a much older Jane Goodall than the young images of her I was used to seeing in National Geographic magazine.

Memorable as our first meeting was, it was what followed that became significant. Because EARCOS was running back-to-back administrator and teacher conferences in Shanghai and all three speakers had been booked for both conferences, Jane Goodall, Robert Hass and I had plenty of time to meet over private dinners. At one of these dinners we posed a question to ourselves as fellow conservationists. “What would be the fastest way to bring about meaningful change in protecting the planet?” Target Asia, we all agreed, for not only does Asia hold the greatest number of people with the greatest economic clout, but it also has the greatest biodiversity. Indonesia alone supports 24 per cent of all species on earth. Next question: “What do we target in Asia?” Answer: international schools. Because there is so little social mobility in Asia, students privileged enough to afford the university tuitions for these elite elementary, middle and high schools are being prepared for positions of decision-making and power their parents ensure they are going to step into.

We now had a mission. “I’ll bring my Roots & Shoots program to Asia,” Jane Goodall announced. She had initiated this environmental-awareness school program in Africa, and it later spread to Europe and the Americas; now it would be available worldwide.

Robert Hass was the next to come forward: “I’ll bring my River of Words program.” Robert had spoken of this program he’d initiated in the United States during his keynote. Students are challenged through poetry and art to get a better understanding of the watershed they live in. We all live in one, but very few people can trace theirs from the headwaters to the sea.

It was now my turn, and an idea that had been formulating in my mind for some time went public. “I’m going to tweak the Rediscovery program I started in Canada to offer international students a study of eight ecosystems in eight days; it will be called Reefs to Rainforests.” And thus, In Touch with Nature Education began, not as a business but as a mission. Since the turn of the twenty-first century the program has hosted thousands of students from some of the best schools in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Our initial eight-day offering, Reefs to Rainforests in Thailand, soon expanded to forty-five outdoor education adventures in twenty-two countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Canada, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Guyana, Indonesia, Laos, Madagascar, Malaysia, the Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Thailand, Uganda and Vietnam. We not only offer these learning adventures to students but to senior citizens (Boomers and Beyond) as well as to teachers and their families during Christmas holidays.

And so it was on the morning of December 26, 2004, that a group from one of our family sessions was sitting together at a beach resort on the Andaman Sea for our final breakfast after a wonderful week-long Christmas trip. It was a glorious, clear day in paradise with a light breeze, gently swaying palm trees and no hint at all that something was about to go terribly wrong. If the tide was receding much too fast and too far out that morning at 8:45, none of us took notice. The night before, after putting the cap on our Christmas party, Kran, one of my Thai staff, received an emergency call from his mother; she needed to go to the hospital for abdominal surgery and she asked for her son to be at her side. He was planning to catch a bus that night, but it was a two-day trip by bus. “Let me get on the phone and try to find you a flight,” I told Kran as we all headed to bed.

Over breakfast the next morning, I was reviewing the group’s flight tickets out of Phuket when I suddenly realized that Kran’s flight was scheduled thirty minutes earlier than the others’. “We need to leave right now,” I told the group, “or Kran will miss his flight and not be with his mother for her surgery.” Reluctantly, everyone stopped eating and boarded the waiting minivans. Twenty minutes later, while we were safely inland, the first global disaster of the twenty-first century struck the Andaman Sea and Indian Ocean coasts, killing a quarter of a million people from over fifty countries. The resort we had just left was now being hit by a series of tsunami waves reaching as high as the coconut fronds; the surviving staff had climbed coconut trees and were phoning my staff on mobile phones to see if we were still alive. Along the road north to Phuket, we saw tourists in shock, and when we stopped to refuel at a gas station crammed with cars, Thais asked us in broken English, “Where you go?”

“Phuket airport,” we answered.

“Phuket finished, airport finished, bridge to island finished,” they told us with alarm. “Ocean eat everything!” Although it was hard to get our heads around it, it was clear something disastrous had happened on the Andaman coast, so I had our minivan driver cross the Thai/Malay Peninsula to Surat Thani airport on the Gulf of Thailand side. There, I managed to get all my guests on flights, buses and trains to Bangkok to connect with their international flights home. Not until I turned on the news that evening did I realize the magnitude of the disaster we had so narrowly escaped.

By the time I returned to Krabi, the corpses were already coming in from Phi Phi Island and surrounding beaches and piling up in makeshift boxes along the town’s main road. It does not take long in the humid tropics for human bodies to decompose, and photos of horribly grotesque corpses were being posted on long bulletin boards for the thousands of tourists and local Thais trying to locate and identify their missing loved ones. It was worse than a nightmare watching people trying to compare their most cherished wallet-sized photos of friends and family to the images of people decomposed beyond recognition posted on the boards. Adding to the horror, the smell of decay from thousands of corpses was overpowering and nauseating. Still, I wanted to see if I recognized anyone. Was that the young boy who had walked his water buffalo down the beach each morning at sunrise in front of my bungalow? The kind Muslim woman who’d made roti on the side of the road? Our gardener and dear Thai friend for the past ten years? It wasn’t long before I couldn’t take the stench anymore and drove out of Krabi town to clear my head. A rainstorm came on so violently that I had to pull off the road as poor visibility made it unsafe for me to drive. I don’t know how long I sat there with the windshield wipers thudding away on high speed before I came to the realization that it was not raining at all and never had been. I was sobbing. For the next few years, I suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, but I would protest with classic denial any time friends would point this out to me.

As friends and family contacted me to see whether I was alive, they also wanted to know how they could help. It may have been the tsunami’s proximity to Christmas, the season of giving, or the fact that more people from more countries had been killed than in any previous global disaster that resulted in the greatest outpouring of generosity the world has ever known. Once the Haida got news that I was, in Guujaaw’s words, “still kicking,” they wanted to know how they could help. A maritime people themselves, with ancient legends of tsunamis destroying entire villages and wiping out generations of people, the Haida could easily empathize with coastal peoples in the aftermath of a tsunami, even an event that occurred on the other side of the planet.

In the days immediately following the Indian Ocean tsunami, the world organized relief efforts in some distinctly silly ways. International Red Cross, based in London, sent two planeloads of thick wool blankets to Aceh, Indonesia, the worst affected area. Never mind that the temperature was over 30° Celsius in North Sumatra at the time—it was winter in England. Germany’s response was far more appropriate. Knowing it could do nothing to bring back the lives already lost, it rushed in water purification systems to prevent an outbreak of cholera from all the contaminated wells, a disease that could easily have claimed more lives than the tsunami.

The Haida Nation wanted to see its donations used most effectively to reach people being bypassed by world relief efforts, and it didn’t take me long to think of who might be falling through the cracks—Indigenous peoples, the most marginalized during the best of times. Something about Haida Gwaii being the most isolated and tsunami-prone body of land in Canada made me want to make a trip to Thailand’s most isolated isles—the Surin Islands. I knew that this small cluster of islands on the Thai border with Myanmar was home to two hundred Indigenous Moken “sea gypsies” and the islands were right in the path of the tsunami, so it seemed an appropriate place to focus relief efforts from one Indigenous maritime nation to another.

Following the South Asian tsunami on December 26, 2004, all that remained of a former Moken village were house posts snapped off by the force of the first wave.

My hunch was correct. Nothing was left of the two Moken villages on Koh Surin but the eerie pilings of former houses snapped from their foundations by the force of the waves. The Moken had lost everything—their homes, boats, fishing spears, nets, food provisions, cookware and clothing—but they still had one another. Miraculously, everyone was accounted for. After weeks of warnings from the spirits of their ancestors and many telltale signs from creatures of the deep sea, the Moken responded to the rapidly receding waters on the morning of December 26 with simple, time-honoured wisdom. All the women, children and elderly of the two villages fled to high ground while the men, who were all employed operating long-tail boats for the national park at the time the tsunami struck, rescued countless tourists and Thais.

Almost none of the Moken can read or write, but all of them survived, as did all of the Indigenous Andaman Islanders; not so the literate world. Graduates from the world’s best universities, doctors, lawyers, professors, business people and aerospace engineers enjoying their Christmas holiday in luxury resorts all along the coasts of Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and East Africa were utterly clueless. Fascinated by grounded boats and flopping fish suddenly stranded by the rapidly receding tide, they walked out into the tidal zone and the deadly approaching waves.

The modern world, with its obsession with technology, reported in the press that South Asia had no tsunami early warning system, hence the staggering loss of life. But if the massive death toll was a failure of technology, or lack of it, why did illiterate societies survive with such success? The painful truth in the discrepancy of survival rates has nothing to do with technology. Rather, it represents the most massive failure of modern education in human history. Oral-tradition societies like the Moken and Andaman Islanders knew exactly what to do in the situation because stories of previous tsunamis had been passed down orally from generation to generation. The hundreds of thousands of people who died in this colossal tragedy were literate peoples with no storytellers and no collective memory.

The late Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen once penned the words, “There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” It took a pretty major crack—a fifteen-hundred-kilometre rift in the Indian Ocean floor that split with the speed of a bullet on December 26, 2004—to let some light in on the value of traditional wisdom, at least as far as the Koh Surin Moken were concerned. They became instant celebrities in Thailand once word got out of their 100-percent survival rate. Thai people now wanted to see and touch a Moken for good luck, as if they were a talisman. A somewhat different scene was playing itself out on India’s Andaman Islands, where Indigenous peoples still live in the forests as neolithic societies. The Indian Air Force sent helicopters out to these remote isles to see whether any survivors were in need of rescue after the tsunami slammed into the Andaman Islands. Again, everyone here had survived, but far from welcoming their “rescuers,” the tribesmen fired poisoned arrows at the helicopters to drive them back.

Koh Surin National Marine Park was officially closed when I arrived by boat; the national park facilities had been totally destroyed. There, camping amid the piles of cement rubble, broken glass and tangled roofs of the former park headquarters, were two hundred Moken refugees who had been evacuated to a Buddhist temple in nearby Kuraburi soon after their two villages were destroyed. The Thai government and relief agencies wanted to permanently resettle the Moken far inland where they would be “safe” from future tsunamis, but nothing would destroy the souls of sea nomads faster than removing them from the sea. Fortunately, the Supreme Patriarch of Buddhism in Thailand proclaimed that the Moken must be allowed to pursue their own path, and that path led them very quickly back to Koh Surin where I encountered them that day.

The few park officials overseeing the site during the park closure were not at all happy seeing the Moken return. “These people are dirty and lazy,” they told me. “They will be hanging out on this beach forever, looking for handouts from tourists.” There was nothing new in this sentiment; it was the same ethnocentrism recorded in every account from the time early explorers and settlers here first encountered the Indigenous Moken. But the park official could not have been more wrong. Without anyone even being aware of it, Moken men had rebuilt thirty-two traditional homes at the head of a bay where one of their former villages stood. Quite serendipitously, I had arrived on the day they were moving in.

Jok Klathalay, the son of the village headman, invited me aboard an already overcrowded long-tail boat he’d borrowed from the national park so I could join the entire Moken community as they moved to their new homes. Remarkably, all the women and children knew which house would be theirs as soon as we landed; they ran up the beach singing and laughing with joy. Long before anyone else in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and East Africa could cope with the shock of the tsunami and the massive loss of life and property, much less start the painful process of rebuilding, the Moken were already comfortably back home. It was the most incredible example of resilience and self-determination I have ever witnessed.

Looking down the long row of neat, palm-thatched houses set on high pilings, I realized there was certainly no need for relief funds to rebuild the village so I asked the village headman, Selamat, how the funds sent to me by the Haida Nation could best be used. Besides their new homes, the Moken had nothing but the clothes on their backs and a few sleeping mats and cooking pots donated by the temple when they were sent as refugees to Kuraburi. “What more do you want?” I tried to ask through a Thai translator friend, but the question was met with blank stares. The Moken have no words in their language for want or worry—rather a paradigm shift on modern values, when you think about it. The islands and the sea provide them with everything they ever need, so there is no want. There’s no concept of worry either, as the Moken believe the spirits of the land, the sea and their ancestors always watch over and protect them. Modern society, by contrast, spends a great deal of time wanting more and worrying how to get it and pay for it.

The question was rephrased: “Is there something that might prove useful for you right now?” The reply was collective and instantaneous: “A drum!” With a drum they could celebrate their survival. The Koh Surin Moken had already come up with a new song and dance to thank the ghosts of their ancestors and the spirits of the sea for sparing their lives. Only an animistic people, deeply connected to the spirit world, would see a drum as the highest priority following a disaster of global proportions, and only an Indigenous maritime people like the Haida would understand how a drum would be a top-priority use of their donation money. Once the drum arrived, an impromptu celebration began with dancing, singing and great rejoicing late into the night. Over the next several weeks I was able to use the donation funds to secure such utilitarian items as fishing nets, food provisions and the first boat that would be truly their own, which they proudly named Andaman Moken. But none of these items brought the Moken the joy of that drum.

Geo Klathalay, a Moken living on Koh Surin, displays food he has foraged from the sea by free-diving. Like an apex predator, no underwater food source escapes this young man’s attention.

It is not often that tragedy and serendipity emerge from a single event, but were it not for this global disaster, I might not have had the happy accident of getting to know the Moken with the level of intimacy that I did. Very little has ever been written about these shy and reclusive peoples because they have historically avoided contact as much as possible with the outside world. Living semi-nomadically aboard floating houseboats called kabangs for much of the year, the Moken of the Surin Islands and Myanmar’s Mergui Archipelago used to go ashore only during the monsoon season when storms forced them to seek shelter in small coves. Even then they always built their one-room thatched dwellings on stilts at the edge of their beloved sea so that waves passing under their huts would lull them to sleep. At high tide, children would fish for squid with small lines and bait through the floorboards and jump from the doorway into the ocean for a quick dip. The word Moken literally means “immersed in the water.” Traditionally, Moken people had no family names. The Queen Mother of Thailand gave the same family name, Klathalay, to all the Koh Surin Moken; it translates as “Courage of the Sea,” and few names have been more appropriately bestowed. No one knows for sure how many Thai and foreign tourists Moken men pulled from the ravaging tsunami waves on December 26, 2004, but it was many, and all of this was done without knowing first if their own wives and children were safe.

A Moken boy learns to spear-fish at a tender age. Though the Moken are superb hunters, only one out of every ten throws is successful in impaling a fish. The 90-percent survival rate for fish hunted this way has long been part of Moken conservation.

At one time large flotillas of Moken kabangs could be spotted in the wilderness waters of the Andaman coast, but the Moken’s survival instinct was to flee in all directions like a school of fish under attack at the first sign on the horizon of a boat that was not of their own. Over countless centuries this survival strategy served the sea nomads well in fleeing from pirates, slave traders, colonial missionaries wanting to convert them and government officials conscripting them for Burma’s military and forced labour camps. Today, the kabangs have all but disappeared as the Thai and Myanmar governments are now seriously determined to settle these peoples.

There is something about the nature of nomadic peoples that settled societies find very unsettling. Is it their freedom of movement we resent, the fact that nomads are so unencumbered? Do we feel threatened that people like the Moken refuse to buy into our consumer values for wealth, happiness and prestige; that they challenge our minds with no words in their language for want or worry when modern societies seem so preoccupied with both? Everywhere I have travelled in the world I have seen the same agenda again and again, even at the United Nations level—attempts to make over ­hunter-gatherer societies in our own agrarian image.

I had shown Selamat, the Moken village headman, two of the books I had written on Indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia: Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rainforest and Living Legend of the Mentawai. The thought of capturing images and stories of a living culture in the pages of a book captivated him, and he made me promise to one day make a book about the Moken. Selamat had already lost five of his six children, the worst fate to befall any parent, but he assigned his last living son, Jok, to be my informant for the book.

Over the years Jok and his nephew Geo became my good friends and such capable informants on all aspects of Moken life that I made them both co-authors on the cover of the book that was published in 2013: Courage of the Sea: Last Stand of the Moken. It might have marked the first time two completely illiterate people became the co-­authors of a book. Unfortunately, Jok Klathalay never got to see the book he helped create. He died suddenly in 2012 from what the villagers regarded as black magic, but his spirit was very much alive guiding me through three sleepless nights as I wrote the text for the book.

Jok Klathalay (right) and his nephew, Geo Klathalay, are both illiterate but such amazing informants of Moken ways that I made them both co-authors of my book Courage of the Sea: Last Stand of the Moken.

They say change is the only thing that can be predicted with certainty in life. Indigenous elders have told me, “If you really want to make the Great Spirit laugh, tell of your plans.” The tsunami that had serendipitously brought Jok and me together on the shores of Koh Surin was becoming more distant, but my narrow escape from that calamity was still vivid in my mind years later when I led a tour group of senior citizens to Nepal and Bhutan in April 2015. Just two hours after they all boarded a flight home from Kathmandu International Airport, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake devastated the country, destroying over 40 per cent of all homes and claiming the lives of over nine thousand people. Sacred One Standing Still and Moving—the Haida name for the earthquake spirit—was definitely moving.

For three nights after Jok Klathalay died I could not sleep, but found myself compelled to write the entire text for the Moken book—as a ghostwriter, if ever there was one.

Like Haida Gwaii, which is moving northward at a rate of about thirty centimetres a year on its own plate from its original location near Baja, Mexico, the entire subcontinent of India is being driven slowly but surely underneath Nepal and Tibet at an average speed of 4.5 centimetres per year. In the decades since the 1934 Bihar earthquake that killed ninety-three hundred people in Nepal, the land mass of India has been pushed about four metres into Nepal. But on Saturday morning, April 25, 2015, an area between 2,590 to 5,180 square kilometres over a zone spanning the cities of Pokhara and Kathmandu slid a staggering ten metres in a matter of seconds. It brought about the second-worst natural disaster in Nepal’s history.

As word reached us on the flight home of what was transpiring on the ground below, a deep sadness overcame everyone who had been on the Nepal journey with me, and the Mentawai name bestowed on me decades earlier—Utut Kunan, meaning Forever and Always Lucky—never resonated more strongly. As Guujaaw said following my second narrow escape from global calamity, “You always seem to be one step ahead of the crocodile, Huck.”