John Chau Wanted to Change Life on North

Sentinel Island. Was He Wrong?

The death of a young American missionary on a tropical island at
the hands of an indigenous group has left us to wonder: Are they
better off with us or without us?
By Jeffrey Gettleman
Mr. Gettleman is the South Asia bureau chief for The Times, based in New Delhi.

The New York Times Nov. 30, 2018

Two weeks ago a young American made a doomed mission to North

Sentinel Island, a speck in the Bay of Bengal and home to perhaps the most
isolated people on earth — all 50 or so of them.

Ever since he was a boy, John Chau, an evangelical missionary with an

acute case of wanderlust, dreamed of spreading Christianity to the people
on North Sentinel. Lying far-off India’s coast in the Andaman Island chain,
North Sentinel is about the size of Manhattan, though not exactly its cousin.
The people there are hunters and gatherers. They follow a lifestyle tens of
thousands of years old. No outsiders know their language. We don’t know
where they came from. We don’t even know what they call themselves —
definitely not the “Sentinelese,” as some people do.

They have attacked just about anyone trying to step onto their shore,
appearing virtually naked and firing arrows. Then they retreat from the
beach and melt into the forest. Why? That’s a mystery, too.

Many of us no doubt marvel that in the 21st century such a place exists. As
Adam Goodheart wrote in a beautiful piece years ago in The American
Scholar, North Sentinel “had somehow managed to slip through the net of
history.”
But Mr. Chau’s widely reported death has dragged this island out of
obscurity and raised some fundamental moral questions. How should we,
in the modern world, interact with the last of these very fragile groups? Is it
better to stick the island in a glass museum case, which the Indian
government has essentially done, and try to keep anyone from interacting
with the islanders?

Or is that paternalistic, denying the people there the same things that just
about the whole world has agreed it wants, like education, health care and
technology? The same issues routinely come up in the Amazon, where a few
fragile groups still exist, though they’re not quite as isolated. Every day,
loggers, anthropologists, traders and tourists get a step closer to them.

What Mr. Chau, 26, did clearly did not work. He came with gifts in hand
(scissors, safety pins, a soccer ball) and the islanders killed him. The police
can’t even get his body back. It is still lying on the beach. What he did was
also illegal. The Indian government prohibits contact, deeming the
islanders an “ultrasensitive human treasure.” Perhaps that is paternalistic;
perhaps it is morally sound.

Mr. Chau saw it as his moral imperative to get to the island. In his
evangelical worldview, it is an act of compassion to introduce people to
Christianity; that is the only way to save them from burning in hell. It’s
called the Great Commission, and North Sentinel represented the greatest
commission, since no one we know of had ever tried to convert the
islanders. Since his death, many people, including fellow missionaries, have
called him naïve, delusional and reckless. “I have zero sympathy for Chau,”
said David Schmidt, a former evangelical missionary. His actions, Mr.
Schmidt said, “were not only foolhardy, they were criminal.”
And speaking of crimes, was it criminal for the islanders to kill Mr. Chau?
The Indian police have opened a homicide case. Another moral question is
whether any islanders should be punished for Mr. Chau’s death.
Anvita Abbi, a linguistics professor with deep knowledge of North Sentinel,
said the islanders have a right to defend their territory. She said it’s no
different from the Stand Your Ground laws in the United States that allow
people to shoot intruders.

“In America, if you enter someone’s garden they come out with guns to
shoot you for trespassing,” she said. “Here, these people have been clearly
telling us that please don’t come near us, we don’t want to meet you. And
yet we keep on barging into their areas, bothering them, and that risks even
the tribe’s death.”

Her argument is basically self-defense. Because of their isolation, she said,

the islanders have no immunity to infections and diseases of the outside
world. Even a common cold could kill them. She said that Mr. Chau put
these people in grave danger and he should have never visited.

John Bodley, an anthropologist at Washington State University, agrees.

“There is no question that this attempt to make contact was totally wrong
and a major violation of their human rights to autonomy,” he said.
“Outsiders need to respect their wishes and treat them with dignity as
fellow human beings. Respect means we don’t assume to know better how
they should live.”

To me that is the operative question. How do they want to live? Can

outsiders presume they don’t want contact without communicating with
them? Where does their hostility come from? Maybe it’s from an old grudge
(in the 19th century, a young British naval officer kidnapped a few of the
islanders and some soon died). Maybe it’s from superstition or something
else.

Kim Hill, an anthropologist at Arizona State University, thinks total

isolation on a tropical island is a bit of a fantasy anyway. He said that it’s
“unwise and inhumane to forcibly keep these groups isolated by building
protective fences around them.”

First, if a population gets too small and isolated, like the people on North
Sentinel, it will probably become extinct. Contact may be dangerous, but so
is no contact. Second, some type of encounter with an outsider is inevitable,
Mr. Hill said, and “accidental contact is a disaster waiting to happen.”
North Sentinel is isolated, but it’s only 30 miles or so from Port Blair, the
region’s growing capital. How long can the Indians keep people away from
the island? Mr. Hill’s solution is to learn what the islanders want so that
they can make the decision about their future.

“Humans are an extremely social species,” he said. “No groups want to live
isolated forever. They do it out of fear.”