On a humid morning off the coast of Raja Ampat, an archipelago of limestone karsts and turquoise lagoons in Indonesia’s West Papua province, a small wooden boat drifts near a reef. A group of indigenous rangers, members of the local Maya tribe, slip into the water, their snorkels breaking the surface as they descend into a world of color and movement. They are not tourists or marine biologists dispatched from Jakarta or New York; instead, they are stewards of their ancestral waters, guarding them against the forces that threaten to strip them bare.
For centuries, the indigenous communities of Raja Ampat have relied on the ocean for survival, practicing Sasi laut, a traditional system of marine conservation that restricts fishing in certain areas for set periods, allowing fish stocks to replenish. But in recent decades, their way of life has come under siege. Industrial fishing fleets trawl the waters, dynamite fishing scars the reefs, and climate change warms and acidifies the sea. Faced with these mounting threats, indigenous leaders are taking bold action, leveraging ancestral knowledge to create some of the world’s most ambitious marine protected areas (MPAs).
Across the Pacific and beyond, indigenous groups are asserting control over marine conservation, rejecting the notion that environmentalism is a Western export. In Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the Woppaburra and Yirrganydji peoples manage vast seascapes, monitoring coral health and enforcing no-take zones. In Hawaii, the Hui Maka‘āinana o Makana organization has restored kapu, a Hawaiian resource management system, in their efforts to rehabilitate fish populations. The message is clear: the people who have lived in harmony with these waters for generations are often the best equipped to protect them.
Yet these efforts do not come without struggle. In many cases, governments and corporations have dismissed indigenous conservation as anecdotal or archaic. The very notion of indigenous people asserting authority over marine spaces has, at times, been met with hostility from industrial fishing interests and policymakers. In the Solomon Islands, communities attempting to enforce traditional marine closures have clashed with foreign fishing operators who see the ocean as a limitless resource, theirs for the taking. In some places, the fight is not only ecological but political, a battle for sovereignty as much as sustainability.
Despite these challenges, the successes are tangible. Raja Ampat, now home to one of the world’s largest networks of community-driven MPAs, has seen fish populations rebound and coral cover increase. In Canada, the Haida Nation secured co-management rights over the Gwaii Haanas National Marine Conservation Area, setting a precedent for indigenous-led stewardship worldwide. And in the Philippines, the Tagbanua people have restored once-depleted fishing grounds through strict enforcement of marine sanctuaries, leading to improved livelihoods for local communities.
These victories underscore a broader truth: conservation cannot be divorced from the people who depend on the sea. As governments and NGOs grapple with how to protect the world’s oceans, indigenous communities are demonstrating that the answer may not lie in new technology or sweeping policies from distant capitals, but in the knowledge passed down through generations—knowledge that has always been there, waiting to be heard.
