21 ~ We, the Sentinelese
NASA Earth Observatory
North Sentinel Island is a 23 square mile (59 km2) postage stamp of forest and coral reefs in the Andaman archipelago of the Bay of Bengal. It is home to a group of indigenous people who have had almost no contact with the outside world. The government of India, which administers the island, keeps it this way. Any approach to within five nautical miles (9.3 km) of North Sentinel is forbidden, and is enforced by patrols of the Indian Navy.
Fragmentary knowledge of the inhabitants’ language suggests they have lived on North Sentinel for tens of thousands of years. Their population is unknown, but is estimated at around 100 or 150. Also unknown is what they call themselves, and so they have been given the name “Sentinelese”. Past decades have seen some brief, cursory contact with Indian anthropologists and the survivors of a few shipwrecks. The Sentinelese sometimes accepted these contacts, and sometimes rejected them, often violently. Most recently, in 2018 a young American Christian missionary landed illegally on the island by kayak, armed with a waterproof Bible, intent on bringing the Word to the inhabitants. The Sentinelese quickly killed him and buried his body on the beach. His mission was at best misguided, and at worst the height of arrogance (or perhaps co-dependence). Given their intimate connections with nature and the sea, unmediated by Facebook, Snapchat, opiods, the National Football League, Walmart or Wall Street, perhaps the Sentinelese could teach us something about getting closer to God.
Other uncontacted peoples are known to live in the western Amazon basin and a few other places in the world. As in India, other enlightened governments have until now safeguarded the isolation of these tribes. Contact would put them at risk not only of cultural annihilation, but physical annihilation from illnesses for which they have no immunity.
I feel comfort and an undercurrent of joy knowing that the Sentinelese and other uncontacted peoples are still out there, speaking languages no one else knows. We are privileged to live in a time when they still share the world with us, hundreds of years after the decimation of most indigenous cultures in my home of the Americas.
A different light still glows, the world still feels fresh and invigorated with diversity, not yet fully homogenized to the dullness of one way of knowing.
I’ve been thinking about the Sentinelese during my experiment in self-sufficiency, and at this time when all of us have been in isolation to protect us from disease, and during which we’ve adapted by creating in small ways our own cultures in our home ‘islands’. While India has kept the Sentinelese from moving toward us, we have recently moved toward them. This is both poignant, and humbling. As we approach a closer affinity with the Sentinelese and others like them, armed with a new understanding of our own vulnerability, perhaps we will feel less compelled to change them to become like us.
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Next week will mark six months since I last went grocery shopping. Reflections on that, and next steps, coming up in a next post.
What I’m reading and can recommend:
The Journey and Ordeal of Cabeza de Vaca, by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
This is another of those books I’ve read, and continue to return to, it is so engaging and thought-provoking. In 1528, Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was marooned with 300 others off the coast of what is now Texas. Only four of the group survived to return to Spain, and they did so by spending the next eight years walking along the Gulf coast, surviving by interacting with various Native American peoples, before reaching a Spanish mission in Mexico. Upon his return to Spain, Cabeza de Vaca put down this account of his ordeal and observations. It’s an extraordinary story. And also a sad one –the many tribes and cultures he describes have long since vanished, wiped out by subsequent European colonization and diseases. Cabeza de Vaca’s fascinating account, published more than 475 years ago, is the sole written record of most of the people and cultures he encountered.