Syaman Rapongan is an acclaimed author who grew up on Pongso no Tao or Orchid Island. After spending more than a decade studying and working in Taiwan, he returned to his home in 1989, joining the local Indigenous social movement and protesting a nuclear waste facility, and turned to literature in the 1990s. He has also made documentary films, founded a workshop on oceanic ethnography, and crossed the Pacific Ocean in a canoe.