Friday, October 20, 2017

Respect Sentinels

“I’d give my right arm to know what they’re thinking.”


If a flying saucer landed in your front yard, would you greet it with a shotgun? If a Jeep crammed with soldiers barreled down your street, would you blast it? 
What if doing so would be the only way to prevent your relatives from being kidnapped? What if doing nothing meant death? After all, if you fired the first shot, maybe you'd have a chance.
The Sentinelese people are violent. At least that is how outsiders see them. They are a Stone Age hunter-gatherer tribe who live on utterly remote North Sentinel Island, one of 572 islands in the archipelago of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal between India and Myanmar (Burma).
The Sentinelese, whose island belongs to India, have lived in solitude for as long as 60,000 years. Experts on ancient human migration believe that they are a remnant of the great movement of people who ventured from Africa to Asia and the New World.

No natural harbor

           No one knows how many Sentinelese there are. Estimates range from 50 to 500. Their 23-square-mile island is heavily forested with mangrove trees.         
           Its narrow white beaches may be alluring, but the island is not an easy place to get to or to leave. Though there are other populated islands within a reasonable distance, North Sentinel Island has no natural harbor. Worse, it is encircled by treacherous submerged reefs that make landing there nearly impossible and leaving arduous.
Perhaps the Sentinelese are lucky. Native tribes on other islands, such as the Onge once numbered as many as 8,000. Their populations have been severely reduced by disease and contact with outsiders. Today there are fewer than 100 Onge.
No one can speak the language of the Sentinelese. Even an Onge who was brought to North Sentinel Island could not understand what the Sentinelese were saying.
Sentinelese homes are lean-tos. They have raised floors and no walls. Three to four families live in one structure. The Sentinelese typically keep a small fire burning near the corner of each home, possibly to ward off snakes and insects.
They use harpoons and to catch fish and sea turtles, and they hunt monitor lizards and wild pigs with longbows. Shrews, bats, and rats also live on the island, though whether the Sentinelese eat these is unknown. The islanders’ diet includes coconuts, wild honey, and nuts. They husk coconuts with their teeth. (Translation: They tear off the outer shell with their teeth. This is actually not so difficult.)
It is believed they have no chief or any sort of leader.
They do not farm.
Their music has only two notes.
They only know the numbers one and two. Anything above that is ‘many.’
They weave baskets, use adzes (small ax-like cutting tools), and know how to make outrigger canoes, though these vessels lack the wherewithal for trips outside the shallows near the island. Their arrowheads are made of metal scavenged from shipwrecks.
Ancient Persian and Arab voyagers who first contacted them thought they were cannibals. This is apparently not true, but the Sentinelese wear jawbones of deceased relatives as necklaces.
Contact with the Sentinelese has been limited. This is due not only to the remoteness of their island but also to the difficulties of going ashore. Plus, the Sentinelese have a well-known reputation for wanting to be left alone. They are not shy about firing barrages of arrows and javelins at outsiders.
Consider why this might be. In 1880, the British kidnapped six islanders. It was British policy to do this when they met new tribes. After abducting some of a tribe's members, they would be returned bearing with lavish gifts to show that the British wanted to be their friends.
However, in the case of the abducted Sentinelese, several died before returning. One might surmise that among the islanders this terrible tale has been passed from generation to generation. Present-day Sentinelese would naturally fear the same evil fate might befall them or their loved ones.
             That said, however, when the British ship Nineveh ran aground on the island’s reef in 1867, naked Sentinelese attacked the 86 survivors who had made it ashore. They waited three days before going after them with iron-tipped spears.
            In 1974, a National Geographic film crew hoped to film a documentary on the island. It retreated and left after the Sentinelese attacked and struck the director in the thigh with an arrow.


           Three years later the freighter Primrose wrecked on the island’s reefs. Its captain radioed for help. When he saw armed islanders building canoes on the beach, he frantically radioed again, asking that firearms be air-lifted to him and his crew.
            A person on Reddit purporting to be the son of Primrose's captain, recounts what he says his father told him when he was 12:
        Their weapons were primitive; arrows and spears. Certainly not the most intimidating weapons by today’s standards. But put these primitive weapons in the hands of 30-40 primitive people that have exclusively hunted with them for centuries against a group of 20 civilized men armed with nothing but a flare gun and you wind up with a fairly uneven fight.
“They tried to board our ship, but the surrounding coral reef preventing them from getting on board. They got close enough for me to see the anger...pure hatred on the faces of the warriors.”
“I watch[ed] as my father [told] the story, his body visibly shaking and his voice trembling as he recall[ed] the moment in his life that brought him the closest to his own demise.
 “Once they were within range they unleashed their weaponry on the ship. Most of us were below deck and we heard the pings of a volley of arrows hitting the side. The few men on deck weren’t afforded the luxury of a steel barrier. They had been trying to communicate and ease tension with the Sentinelese.
“They threw them some food, made friendly gestures. It did nothing to ease their hostility towards us.” He grew silent for a moment, reliving the next moments before he finally spoke. “Two of our guys...two were hit. One was struck in the leg. The other...they got him in the head.”

Volleys of arrows

 A Sikorsky helicopter sent by the Indonesian company P.T. Airfast Services rescued the crew. Its daring pilot Bob Fore made multiple landings on the freighter's deck. There were only two feet of extra space to spare between the tips of his spinning rotors and the ship's superstructure.
More recently, in 2006, islanders killed two fisherman who went the island to illegally hunt crabs. When the Indian government dispatched a helicopter to retrieve their bodies, Sentinelese emerged from the underbrush and loosed volleys of arrows at the great metal bird.
          Not every Sentinelese interaction with the outside world has been violent. Between the late 1960s and early 1990s, the Indian government sent the islanders “contact missions” whose members were anthropologists.
        “I’d give my right arm to know what they’re thinking, but we just haven’t learned enough about them yet,” said Trilokinath Pandit, the Director of Tribal Welfare with Anthropological Survey of India.
        The islanders were wary of the outsiders and baffled by them. “Clothing doesn’t make much sense to them,” said Pandit. “They’re curious about what we were trying to hide underneath.”
      Female anthropologist Dr. Madhumala Chattopadhyay had many experiences with the Sentinelese. “Never ever in my six years of doing research alone with the tribes of Andamans did any man ever misbehave with me,” she said. “The tribes might be primitive in their technological achievements but socially they are far ahead of us.”
       Her encounters suddenly ended when the Indian government imposed a three-mile protective zone around the island. Too much harm had been done to tribes in the islands. Today the Sentinelese are left in peace as they have been for 60,000 years.

MORAL: Respect your ancestors.

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