An isolated people
On North Sentinel Island, a 59.6 square kilometer patch of dense forest in the Bay of Bengal, live the Sentinelese. They are one of the last human groups to remain almost entirely isolated from the outside world. Genetic and archaeological evidence suggests their ancestors may have arrived in the Andaman Islands as long as 60,000 years ago, as part of the first human migrations out of Africa. Their long separation means their language is unclassified and unintelligible to neighboring indigenous groups like the Onge and Jarawa.
The Sentinelese are a hunter-gatherer society. They hunt wild pigs, fish in the shallow coastal waters with bows and arrows, and gather plants from the forest. They live in small communal huts with thatched roofs and are healthy and thriving. While sometimes described as a "Stone Age" tribe, they use metal recovered from shipwrecks, fashioning it into tips for their arrows and other tools. Population estimates are uncertain, ranging from a low of 15 to a high of 500, with most figures falling between 50 and 200 individuals.
A history of hostile encounters
Nearly every attempt at contact has been met with hostility. An 1880 expedition led by British colonial officer Maurice Vidal Portman ended in tragedy. Portman and his team captured an elderly couple and four children. The adults quickly sickened and died, and the children were returned to the island with gifts. This event may have cemented the tribe's policy of violent rejection of outsiders.
Modern attempts have fared no better. In 1974, a National Geographic film crew was met with a volley of arrows, injuring the director. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, Indian anthropologist T. N. Pandit led "gift-dropping" missions, leaving coconuts and bananas. These resulted in a few brief, peaceful encounters in 1991 where the Sentinelese approached unarmed to collect the goods, but the friendly gestures did not last. The Indian government officially ended these missions in 1996.
After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which tectonically uplifted the island and exposed its surrounding coral reefs, an Indian Coast Guard helicopter sent to check for survivors was driven off by a Sentinelese man firing an arrow. In 2006, two fishermen whose boat drifted ashore were killed by the tribe. The most recent incident occurred in 2018, when American missionary John Allen Chau illegally visited the island and was killed. Indian authorities have since abandoned efforts to recover his body.
The law of isolation
The Indian government enforces a strict policy of non-interference. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Protection of Aboriginal Tribes) Regulation, 1956, makes it illegal to travel to North Sentinel Island. The government has established a tribal reserve that includes the entire island and its surrounding waters up to 5 nautical miles (9.26 kilometers). This exclusion zone is patrolled by the Indian Navy and Coast Guard to prevent intrusions. The policy is a dual-purpose measure: it protects the Sentinelese from diseases to which they likely have no immunity, and it protects outsiders from the islanders' violent response to contact.