In 1996, a Jarawa teenager named Enmei fell out of a fruit tree he’d been robbing in the Indian village of Kadamtala, and broke his leg. For centuries they refused all friendly contact with outsiders, preferring to shoot arrows at intruders on their land and to raid the villages on the edge of the forest. The Jarawa people live in the jungle of South Andaman Island. Andaman Island, India, 2002: One of the warnings posted by Indian authorities along the Andaman Trunk Road (ATR) going along the Jarawas’ territory (Photo: Thierry Falise/LightRocket via Getty Images) The Onge people live in another, larger reservation and number about 100. Most of them are alcoholics many also suffer from diabetes. They no longer speak their language fluently but instead, communicate in an Andamanese-Hindu pidgin. The Great Andamanese, who were once the archipelago’s most populous people, today number about 30 and live on a small reservation island in concrete houses. When they killed Chau, the Islanders were neutralising a biological weapon.Ī look at the modern history of the other indigenous peoples of the Andamans suggests that the Sentinelese have been wise to isolate themselves.Īnthropologists believe there were at least 5,000 Andamanese when the British arrived in 1789. Chau was a healthy young man, but like anyone from the West, he was loaded with pathogens that could swiftly kill the Sentinelese who lack our immunity to a slew of diseases. When he climbed into a kayak and paddled through North Sentinel’s reef, Chau made his craft into a rocket, and himself into its warhead. John Chau may have had peaceful intentions when he approached North Sentinel Island, but his mere presence on the island could’ve been devastating. The Sentinelese strangled and buried them. Their anchor broke their boat drifted ashore. In 2006, two drunken Indian poachers fell asleep off North Sentinel Island. When Sentinelese shout protests from their beach, or approach in canoes, the fishermen often shoot. Indian authorities have declared an exclusion zone around North Sentinel, but fishermen-poachers persist in entering that zone. An anthropologist who came calling in 1974 got an arrow in his leg. A search party found him on the beach with his throat cut. In 1896, a convict escaped from the prison at Port Blair, and was washed ashore at North Sentinel. It’s unsurprising that after the raid of 1880, the Sentinelese resisted visitors to their island. The pair of old people died quickly, but the children endured weeks in Portman’s ‘care’ before being returned to North Sentinel.
The Sentinelese fled before Portman’s force, but he was able to capture and remove to Port Blair four children and two elderly islanders. Some of Portman’s pornography survives: his photos show black bodies decorated by jewellery the colonist had imported from Europe. By 1880, he’d already led raids on several islands in the archipelago, and taken away children and adolescents to photograph and molest. Portman was a paedophile and a pederast who was obsessed by the bodies of young Andamanese men.
In 1880, the British colonial administrator Maurice Portman led an armed expedition to North Sentinel. But the Sentinelese have good reason to distrust outsiders. Many journalists and commentators have interpreted the slaying of Chau as the work of an aggressive and xenophobic culture. Contemporary Pacific scholars can help us see the North Sentinelese in a clearer light. After all, the same sort of misconceptions were once aimed at the indigenous peoples of our region. Here in the South Pacific, we’re in a good position to lance these myths. Journalists and commentators around the world have been busy explaining that the island is part of the Andamans archipelago, that its inhabitants are hostile to all interlopers, and that the Indian government, which has administered the Andamans since the British departed in 1947, has forbidden all contact with them.īut there are three myths about the North Sentinelese that have been regurgitated, in article after article. The recent death of John Chau has made North Sentinel Island famous. The heathens buried him in the beach where he had hailed them. His third visit to the island was his last. Twice the missionary retreated to a ship beyond the island’s reef. The missionary greeted them in English they replied with arrows. Men emerged from trees at the edge of the beach. A young man landed on a small island, with a Bible in his hand. The recent killing of an American by a North Sentinel tribe has put the isolated island on the map. But there are three myths about the North Sentinelese that have been regurgitated in media.
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