Seramese

The Seramese are the indigenous peoples of Seram, the largest island of the Moluccas, honoured across central Maluku as Nusa Ina, the Mother Island.

Interior groups such as the Alune and Wemale lived from sago and shifting cultivation, spoke Nunusaku languages, and traced their descent through two traditional leagues, the Patasiwa and Patalima, whose origins are told in the Hainuwele coconut-girl myth. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Seram lay in the sphere of Ternate, often ruled through its vassal Buru.

Portuguese explorers mapped its southern coast in 1512; Dutch trading posts opened in the early seventeenth century and the island came under nominal Dutch rule around 1650. Tidore held suzerainty over eastern Seram from 1700 to 1768, and in the 1780s the island became the main base of Prince Nuku of Tidore's rebellion against the Dutch.