Debating What’s Best for Isolated Tribes
In mid-November, a young American made a doomed mission to North Sentinel Island, a speck in the Bay of Bengal and home to perhaps the most isolated people on earth — all 50 or so of them.
Ever since he was a boy, John Chau, an evangelical missionary with an acute case of wanderlust, dreamed of spreading Christianity to the people on North Sentinel.
Lying far off India’s coast in the Andaman Island chain, North Sentinel is about the size of Manhattan. The people there are hunters and gatherers. They follow a lifestyle tens of thousands of years old. No outsiders know their language. They have attacked just about anyone trying to step onto their shore, appearing virtually naked and firing arrows. Then they retreat from the beach and melt into the forest. Many of us marvel that in the 21st century such a place exists.
But Mr. Chau’s widely reported death has dragged this island out of obscurity and raised some fundamental moral questions. How should we interact with these very fragile groups? Is it better to try to keep anyone from interacting with the islanders? Or is that paternalistic, denying them the things that just about the whole world has agreed it wants, like education and health care?
Mr. Chau, 26, came with gifts in hand (scissors, safety pins, a soccer ball) and the islanders killed him. What he did was illegal. The Indian government prohibits contact, deeming the islanders an “ultrasensitive human treasure.” Perhaps that is paternalistic; perhaps it is morally sound.
Mr. Chau saw it as his moral imperative to get to the island. In his evangelical worldview, it is an act of compassion to introduce people to Christianity; that is the only way to save them from hell.
Since his death, many people, including fellow missionaries, have called him naïve, delusional and reckless.
Anvita Abbi, a linguistics professor with knowledge of North Sentinel, said the islanders have a right to defend their territory. She said it’s no different from the Stand Your Ground laws in the United States that allow people to shoot intruders.
She said: “These people have been clearly telling us that please don’t come near us, we don’t want to meet you. And yet we keep on barging into their areas, bothering them, and that risks even the tribe’s death.” Because of their isolation, she said, the islanders have no immunity to infections of the outside world. She said that Mr. Chau put these people in danger.
John Bodley, an anthropologist at Washington State University, agrees. “Outsiders need to respect their wishes and treat them with dignity as fellow human beings,” he said. “Respect means we don’t assume to know better how they should live.”
But can outsiders presume they don’t want contact without communicating with them? Kim Hill, an anthropologist at Arizona State University, said that it’s “unwise and inhumane to forcibly keep these groups isolated by building protective fences around them.”
First, if a population gets too small and isolated, it will probably become extinct. Contact may be dangerous, but so is no contact. Second, some type of encounter with an outsider is inevitable, Mr. Hill said, and “accidental contact is a disaster waiting to happen.” North Sentinel is isolated, but it’s only 50 kilometers or so from Port Blair, the region’s growing capital.
Mr. Hill’s solution is to learn what the islanders want so that they can make the decision about their future. “Humans are an extremely social species,” he said. “No groups want to live isolated forever. They do it out of fear.”
But how does one start a dialogue with a group of people who greet you with a drawn bow? Vishvajit Pandya is an Indian anthropologist who made three trips to North Sentinel. In 1998, he accompanied a government team that presented the islanders with bags of coconuts. The islanders accepted them without hurting anyone, though they then made obscene gestures.
“It takes a certain amount of courage and hard thinking,” Mr. Pandya said about the next step. “It has to start with gift giving, years of gift giving, then the language has to be learned through this gift giving. You have to make an effort to engage in dialogue. It’s not easy, but everybody is entitled to think about their future, that is the first right, the right to have rights.”
When I asked if the island was beautiful — the few photos I’ve seen show white beaches and bright blue seas — he snapped: “No, it’s filthy. It’s disgusting. Tell people not to go.” Then he laughed. “It’s actually a very interesting landscape,” Mr. Pandya said. “The winds are so strong, the trees grow like a Mohawk, all the same height.”
“It’s a beautiful place,” he added. “But please, don’t go.”