- So far, the dialogue around
the uncontacted tribe of indigenous people
that live on India's North Sentinel Island
has been pretty rough and pretty vague.
Marco Polo wrote some pretty awful things
about them in the 13th century
and a British naval officer
abducted six of them,
including four children, in the 1800s.
And multiple attempts to make contact
have been pretty unsuccessful.
There was a group in the 90s
who managed to exchange coconuts
with the Sentinelese,
but they were turned away fairly quickly.
In 2006, two Indian fishermen
were killed by the Sentinelese
after their boat drifted
towards the island during the night.
After that, India and
the rest of the world
kind of decided to back off a bit
and give them a bit of space.
Isolated, antisocial, shy,
there's actually very little known
about the small population of people
that live on the island.
But that didn't stop the
community that does live there
from making headlines earlier this month.
- [Reporter] An American
tourist gone missing.
- U.S. National John Chau was killed
in the North Sentinel Island.
- The last days of that
American missionary
who was murdered on a
remote Indian Island.
- That's John Allen Chau, an American
who traveled to North Sentinel Island
to meet with the Sentinelese people
and begin his missionary quest.
A police report said that Chau met up
with local fishermen and arranged
to be taken to North Sentinel Island.
He went offering gifts like scissors
and a medical kit and a soccer ball
before he was shot and
killed with an arrow.
Chau's story has now
erupted and it's triggered
a big conversation about lots of things.
His motives, what uncontacted
tribe actually means,
and whether or not the rest of the world
has any right to interfere.
And, what exactly the Indian government
should do about a foreigner
who was technically killed on their watch.
I got in touch with Amber
from our BuzzFeed offices in New York,
who's been reporting a lot about this.
- The Indian government try to really give
a lot of distance to
the Sentinelese people
and let them live their life that the
approach has been hands off, eyes on,
which means every six months a boat goes
and just checks from a faraway distance
that the tribe is okay and
the people are healthy.
This sort of murder investigation
and dead body has obviously been
very difficult for the Indian police
to know how to deal with.
So far, the only people
who have been charged
are the fishermen and local contacts
of John Chau's that arranged
for him to visit the island.
He didn't really believe or wasn't,
didn't have enough information to believe,
what had been said about the risk of,
the tribe may have had by
receiving John Chau to them
by even just his presence being there
may have put them at
a huge risk of disease
and could have decimated the tribe.
His friend Milton Ramsey didn't
really believe that to be true
or didn't know enough about it
and still said that he would encourage
his friend to go on this trip
despite knowing that it
resulted in his death.
- Online, there's been
plenty of finger pointing
about the motives of Chau
and interest in North
Sentinel Island itself.
Hell, Twitter threads just explaining
the history of the
island went super viral.
Some have criticized his
actions as a missionary
while others have accused
him of being a travel blogger
or an Instagram influencer just
trying to get another photo.
Some of Chau's old
Instagram photos resurfaced
and people claimed that he was
an ambassador for a beef jerky company.
However, make no mistake
Chau was a missionary.
That's what his family said
on a post on his Instagram.
And the group that
trained him, All Nations,
have remembered the 26-year-old
for sharing the gospel
with those who have never heard.
Elsewhere, religious
groups have gone so far
as to calling him a martyr.
In his journal, which was given
to the Washington Post
by his mum, Chau wondered
if the island was Satan's last stronghold.
But some organizations are concerned
that the new spotlight
on the island could mean
bad things for the Sentinelese people.
- I think the most
important thing for people
who have never heard of
the Sentinelese before
or didn't even know
about uncontacted tribes
to take away from this really
tragic story is to know
that there are uncontacted
tribal peoples out there,
that they are making an active choice,
no one is uncontacted in 2018 by mistake
or because they haven't realized
that there are people outside.
They're making an active choice
to remain isolated, to remain uncontacted,
and that has to be respected.
The main clear danger for the Sentinelese
when people try and contact them
and land on their island is disease.
They are uniquely vulnerable
to diseases from outside.
All uncontacted peoples
are extremely vulnerable.
It's not uncommon for
up to 90% of a community
to be wiped out by disease when
they first come into contact
with outsiders with diseases
to which they have no immunity.
And for the Sentinelese,
they're particularly vulnerable
because they live on an island
so they're really really
isolated in that way.
- Ultimately, the story of the Sentinelese
has inspired a lot of opinions.
And while some people like
to believe that it's time
we engage with the Sentinelese
and visit more regularly,
Greg Downey, Professor of Anthropology
at Macquarie University in
Sydney, says interacting
with the Sentinelese is kind
of the worst thing we can do.
- And the sad thing is,
in every case we know of
the first assimilation of people
to the forest with westernized
societies always leads
to incredible population
crash because of disease.
The second thing is,
they don't get invited in
to become middle class members of society.
They get drug into the
most fringe, marginalized,
impoverished, disease-ridden,
these are places
where the governments can't provide
medical care to the existing population,
let alone to the folks even
deeper into the forest.
And so, when westerners say
oh, but they have medicine,
well, not everybody in these regions
who is part of western
societies has medicine,
access to medical care and vaccinations.
I mean, these are places where
people don't make much money.
There isn't good infrastructures.
So to sort of say oh, they'll
benefit from the west,
well, the evidence shows
that not every poor person
benefits from contact with the west.
- Indian officials still are unsure
how they're going to retrieve
the body of John Chau
and are even being urged to
abandon efforts altogether.
But, that's where we are at the moment.
There's a bunch of people on Twitter,
some are opinion writers,
all experts in the field.
Who you choose to side with when it comes
to the Sentinelese people
is entirely up to you.
(uptempo music)
