![]() It’s believed the Sentinelese killed Chau after he asked a local friend to find a boat and several fishermen to help him get closer to the prohibited island.įrom the boat, the fishermen said Chau used a canoe to reach the shore on November 16. John Allen Chau, an American adventurer and missionary, is thought to have been killed by members of a remote tribe in the Andaman island chain. So the Sentinelese fear of outsiders is very understandable,” the group said. “The British colonial occupation of the Andaman Islands decimated the tribes living there, wiping out thousands of tribespeople, and only a fraction of the original population now survive. Two years later, members of the tribe killed two poachers who had been illegally fishing in the waters surrounding their home island, North Sentinel Island, after their boat drifted ashore, according to Survival International, a nonprofit dedicated to the protection of isolated tribal groups, which calls the tribe the “world’s most isolated.” In 2004, following the Asian tsunami that devastated the Andaman chain, a member of the tribe was photographed on a beach on the island, firing arrows at a helicopter sent to check on their welfare. Two captured adults died of illness while the four children were returned – perhaps also infected with illnesses that the islanders’ immune systems were unequipped to deal with.Įxcept for a brief, friendly interaction in the early 1990s, they have fiercely resisted contact with outsiders, even following disaster. DESHAKALYAN CHOWDHURY/AFP/Getty Images/Fileįirst contact was made by the British in the late 1800s, when, despite their attempts to hide, six individuals from the tribe were captured and taken to the main island of the Andaman Island archipelago. Port Blair, the administrative capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Their numbers have declined in recent years, but accurate counts are hard to obtain because the Sentinelese can only be observed from a distance due to the dangers in approaching the tribe.Īccording to India’s 2011 census, only 15 Sentinelese were estimated to remain on the island.ĭescribed as “arguably the most enigmatic people on our planet,” by Norwegian geneticist Erika Hagelberg, the wider group of Andaman Islanders, which comprises several distinct tribal groups, was largely isolated until the island chain was turned into a British penal colony in the 19th century. Laws banning outsiders from going within five nautical miles of the island are also there to protect strangers because the tribe, which has lived on the island for tens of thousands of years, has a history of forcefully repelling outsiders. The Sentinelese, as they’re known, are protected by Indian law to preserve their way of life and protect them from modern illnesses to which they have no immunity. The tribe that appears to have killed American John Allen Chau on remote North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal is one of a number of vanishing peoples sealed off from the rest of the world.
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