"The issue here is respect. They have the right to live as they deem best. Leave them be."
"The issue here is respect. They have the right to live as they deem best. Leave them be."
A man wanting to convert to Christianity the inhabitants of an island declared off-limits by authorities defies the prohibition on Nov. 14 by paying fishermen to take him there; on Nov. 16, he dies a grisly death at the hands of irate natives.
American missionary John Allen Chau was obsessed with bring the word of God to the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, part of the Andaman and Nicobar group of islands administered by India.
The North Sentinelese, one of the world’s last remaining traditional hunter-gatherer societies, have actively resisted outside contact. This has led the Indian government to ban visitors to the island to protect its people and their way of life. They have been left in utter isolation, without government intervention.
Chau knew what he was doing was illegal, but as he said in his final letter, he believed Jesus had bestowed him with the strength to go to the most forbidden places on Earth. In one passage, he asked God if North Sentinel was “Satan’s last stronghold.”
In another, he asked: “What makes them become this defensive and hostile?”
The North Sentinelese are not a wholly “uncontacted” tribe. In the late 19th century, British naval officer Maurice Vidal Portman went to the island, observed the inhabitants, and, as part of his “experiments,” took, or “kidnapped” several adults and children and brought them to a nearby British prison island. The adults fell ill and died; the children he returned.
Some scientists theorize it could be this experience that soured the tribe on further contact with outsiders. Since then, they have generally greeted visitors with a shower of arrows and aggressive gestures of repudiation. In 1970, the director of a National Geographic documentary took an arrow in the leg. In 2006, two Indian fishermen whose boat had accidentally strayed into their island were killed. Chau was no exception to the islanders’ policy of isolation.
Chau’s story and his dark end could have come from the annals of the early modern period to the Victorian era, the age of empire. People from Europe swashbuckled their way through swathes of land in Africa and Asia, claiming large areas of territory for their countries, reaping their resources, and ruling over and trafficking their inhabitants as slaves. As colonizers, white people became the symbol of oppression worldwide.
Often, economic and political conquest were accompanied by forced religious conversion of the colonized. This we well know from our country’s own experience with Spain over 400 years.
Chau belongs to a wave of “white saviors,” people imbued with a “messiah complex” to “help” out-group people, in many cases whether they like it or not.
Indian anthropologist T. N. Pandit, who visited North Sentinel several times between 1967 and 1991, says the tribe only wants to be left alone. “They are not wanting anything from you. We are coming to them,” he said. “They suspect that we have no good intentions. That’s why they are resisting.”
Chau did not respect that clearly communicated wish, and flouted authority in order to pursue his own self-imposed agenda and inflict his desires upon a people who want nothing to do with outsiders. To call an island and its inhabitants “Satan’s last stronghold” is the arrogance of someone in a position of self-assumed superiority.
In a Nov. 25 interview by Scroll, Indian sociologist Rudolf Heredia says Chau was a “foolish man,” a “fundamentalist making the historical mistake of treating Christianity as a political ideology through a rather colonialist mission to convert a remote group he viewed as a primitive tribe.”
“Some missionaries want to be martyrs,” he said. “They want to prove their bona fides by doing this kind of thing. Some act out of ignorance. Maybe he [Chau] wanted to make a sensation. We don’t know what his psychological motivations were. But he violated the space and the culture of the tribe, when he should have respected them.”
Would leaving the Sentinelese alone indefinitely be beneficial to them? They survive without schools, hospitals, and the other trappings of modern society. However, contact with outsiders can leave them vulnerable to diseases that they do not have immunity for, and destroy their culture and lifestyle.
The issue here is respect. They have the right to live as they deem best. What we should do is to leave them be.
Dr. Ortuoste is a multi-awarded writer and researcher. FB and Twitter: @DrJennyO