There are 100 or more “uncontacted” tribes around the world, but it’s safe to say that the Sentinels are the most isolated group.
Against the colossal forces of colonialism and economic globalization, they have resisted (sometimes violently) nearly every attempt at contact from the outside world for thousands of years. The Sentinels made international headlines in 2018 when a Christian missionary from the US illegally trespassed on their island and was killed there with a bow and arrow. But this event is only a very small part of their story involving the island.
The tribe lives on North Sentinel Island, a landmass of approximately 60 square kilometers located between India and Myanmar in the Indian Ocean. Under Indian law, it is illegal to travel within five nautical miles (9.26 kilometers) of the island, primarily to respect their traditional way of life and protect them from foreign diseases to which they are not immune.
To the east of their small island lies an archipelago known as the Andaman Islands, but even these neighboring communities have rarely made contact with the Sentinels in recorded history. This special situation of the Sentinels, without even their neighbors, makes them the most isolated tribe on Earth and places their isolation in a unique position. However, given this extreme isolation of the Sentinels, the rest of the world knows almost nothing about how they lived.
Sentinels: an isolated community of 100 people
Although the 2011 Census of India estimated that only 15 people lived on North Sentinel Island, the actual number is thought to be around 100.
According to reports of people observing the island from afar on a boat, as many as 100 people are believed to live in three separate groups. Their settlements consist of two different types of houses: large communal sheds and temporary shelters without walls.
Sophie Grig, Senior Research and Advocacy Officer at Survival International, said in a statement: “Most of what we know about lifestyles comes from what can be seen from afar from boats. “We don’t even know what they call themselves,” he says.
Grig worked on the Sentinels campaign for Survival International, an NGO founded to protect the rights of tribal peoples and seek to ensure their desire to stay out of touch is respected. We can also say that the Sentinels clearly show their desire to be left alone.
In the 1970s, the Indian government established a policy to teach them agriculture and introduce it into their own society. Although they did not know their language, they wanted to send boats and give gifts to the tribe. The Sentinels largely rejected these attempts, bowing their bows to visitors knowing they were not welcome.
“There was a brief period in the 1990s when the Sentinelians really allowed them to get close enough, land on the beach, and get some of the coconut,” Grip says. Although no one really knows why, they later stopped allowing it and became more hostile again,” he says. “We don’t know if it’s because some people [in the tribe] got the disease.”
Death and aftermath of a Christian missionary
After protests from indigenous rights groups, the Indian government abandoned this plan to make contact in the late 1990s, and Sentinels continued to express their hostility to the outside world. With the death of a Christian missionary in 2018, the last few years have seen a series of events in which Sentinels have reacted aggressively to outsiders.
India’s National Coast Guard hovered over the island in a helicopter to see if the community needed help after the devastating tsunami that rocked the Indian Ocean in December 2014. Surprisingly, a lone person followed the helicopter and tried to shoot it down with arrows. It was pretty clear that they didn’t want help.
Another incident occurred in 2006 when two fishermen from India were accidentally dragged onto the island and immediately killed by Sentinels.
“They make a clear choice and they make it very clear that they want to be out of touch with the world and be left alone,” Grig says.
Why are they being so aggressive?
Looking at the historical events during the colonial period, it becomes a little easier to understand why the Sentinels wanted to distance themselves from strangers.
In 1880, British Royal Navy officer Maurice Vidal Portman sent a group to make contact with the people of North Sentinel Island. When they reached the shore, the islanders fled into the trees and found nothing but abandoned villages when the British set foot on their island. In the end, Portman’s men captured six people, including an elderly man and woman, as well as some children, to be sent back to their base in the nearby Andaman Islands.
As Grig points out, “Inevitably, they all got very sick. The old couple died and the colonists thought it would be a great idea to send the children back to the island. The children were taken back with some gifts, but the greatest gift they took with them was almost certainly illness. We don’t know, but the reason Sentineles are so resistant to strangers may be that they have some sort of memory of that contact.”
The Sentinels continue to exist and thrive
A few years ago, people were saying that it was completely impossible for uncontacted humans to survive in the future. In fact, we now know more uncontacted people than we knew ten years ago. They have lived on this island for thousands of years, possibly tens of thousands of years. They look incredibly healthy, thrive, and clearly choose to live that way.
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