Tragically, that's exactly what happened. "I think I could be more useful alive though, but to you, God, I give all the glory of whatever happens. "If you want me to get actually shot, or even killed with an arrow then so be it," wrote Chau in his diary that night. Chau came back and dodged even more arrows, including one shot from a young boy that pierced Chau's waterproof Bible, according to another profile in The New Yorker. "I hollered 'my name is John, I love you and Jesus loves you,'" Chau wrote in his diary. When Chau first waded up to the Island, he brought a large fish as a gift. Chau chronicled his missionary trip in a diary and came prepared to deal with any "contingencies" of contact with hostile residents, including dental forceps for removing arrows. "He gestured to us to leave immediately and we left," she says.Ĭhau was a well-trained outdoorsman, according to an in-depth profile in The Guardian, and he submitted to several rounds of vaccinations to ensure that he didn't bring any outside diseases to the Sentinelese. "The man got angry and whipped out his knife," said Chattopadhyay. The police officer forcefully took it back. One Sentinelese man even tried to grab one of the policemen's rifles, mistaking it for just another scrap of metal. The Sentinelese weren't satisfied with collecting floated coconuts, so they boarded the ship and took the whole bag. But they weren't allowed to enter the jungle or see the village.Įncouraged, the anthropologists returned a few months later with a much larger team. They even allowed some of the outsiders to walk around the beach and interact with Sentinelese women, teenagers and children. They happily accepted all of the coconuts. Some of the tribesmen waded out to the boat and examined it. Perhaps it was the presence of a woman, but for some reason the Sentinelese let down their guard. "To our surprise some of the Sentinelese came into the water to collect the coconuts." "We started floating coconuts over to them," recalled Chattopadhyay in a National Geographic article. "The tribes of the islands do not need outsiders to protect them, what they need is to be left alone." She was the first woman to visit the isolated tribe in the 1990s but has vowed never to go back. Their troubles started after they came into contact with outsiders," said Madhumala Chattopadhyay, an Indian anthropologist, in an interview for National Geographic. " have been living on the islands for centuries without any problem. What's amazing is that this almost Neolithic society exists less than 20 miles (32 kilometers) from neighboring islands where Indigenous cultures have mixed with the modern world, not always with happy results. The islanders live in basic structures, spearfish from dugout canoes and wear no clothing at all. Chau was only the latest in a long line of unwelcome outsiders - merchants, escaped convicts, fisherman and filmmakers - whose intrusions onto the island have been met with an angry volley of arrows.īut the few tantalizing glimpses of life on isolated North Sentinel Island paint an intriguing picture of an untouched society of hunter-gatherers. In 2018, North Sentinel Island made the news when a young American missionary named John Allen Chau was killed on the island after repeatedly ignoring the Sentinelese's warnings to stay away.
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