Why Uncontacted Tribes Want to Stay Uncontacted
About 10,000 people on Earth still live as members of what some anthropologists call “uncontacted tribes”: groups of hunter-gatherers in almost total seclusion from the outside world, many of them deep in the Amazon Basin. But no human community is more isolated than the inhabitants of tiny North Sentinel Island in the Andaman archipelago, far off the coast of India in the Bay of Bengal. The Sentinelese, as they are known to outsiders—no one has gotten close enough to learn what they call themselves, or even what language they speak—still hunt with bows, arrows, and spears. They also use these weapons to kill anyone who ventures onto their shore, including a persistent 26-year-old American Christian missionary, John Chau, in 2018.
News of Chau’s demise on that remote beach swept across the international press and social media, surprising readers with the fact that such a terra incognita could exist in the 21st century. Since then, the Sentinelese, who likely number from 50 to 200, have become symbols of resistance to the seemingly inexorable forces of modernization and globalization. A new documentary, , which premieres in theaters today and will be streaming online later this year, promises to draw new attention to Chau’s obsessive life and the tribe that lethally rejected his evangelism. (I was a consultant to the filmmakers.) Meanwhile, the Hollywood director Justin Lin, franchise, is set to start shooting a of the story.
