Native Disinterest
Forgive us your trespasses…
We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter. ― Antonin Artaud
North Sentinel Island is part of an Indian archipelago in the Bay of Bengal. It is the home of the indigenous Sentinelese people, who are often called one of the last Stone Age tribes on earth. They are also known as fiercely xenophobic and ever hostile to outsiders. In 1956, showing much wisdom, the Indian Government declared the island a protected sanctuary and has legally prohibited anyone from going closer than than 3 nautical miles near its coastline. But if the Sentinelese aren’t curious about us, we remain curious about them. Which is rude. Rudeness tempts a deathwish.
Estimates of the Sentinelese population range from 50 to 200. Almost nothing is known of their language except that it seems to be mutually unintelligible to other tongues on the archipelago, but it may have some overlap with the language of the neighboring Onge, to whom the Sentinelese might be related. Unfortunately for the academy, linguistic field work has been frequently cut short by arrows. The lesson should be obvious: If the Sentinelese do not care to tell us about their language, it is because it is still a living thing, not a set of dead morphological signs. Who wants to know, and even more importantly—why?
Friendly contact has occurred several times in the past. Most notably in 1967, when the respected anthropologist Triloknath Pandit visited the island and was able to gather some data. Dr Pandit must have been a wise man who understood the benefit of good manners and the dangers of too much nosiness. Earlier contact followed along more predictable colonial lines. In 1867, a ship washed up off the Sentinel reef and the survivors summarily attacked. They managed to evade the native defenders until they were rescued several days later. In 1880, the Royal Navy sent an armed expedition to the island. Knowing they were outgunned by this pithy formation, the Sentinelese temporarily abandoned their villages and retreated to the bush. The Brits did manage to bring back an old man, a woman, and four children. It is recorded that the first two died in captivity—a euphemism for being killed slowly by your kidnappers. The children, who quickly fell ill in the alien surroundings, were soon returned to the island with a few gifts. Maybes the Brits thought these gifts might heal the sick and resurrect the dead, which shows that a fetishized, magical thinking must have predominated in the Royal Navy at the time. There have been several cases where visitors to the island found no one at all to attack them. A British census was conducted in 1911 and again in 1932. They did spot a few people at a distance, but they found the usual empty villages the deeper they penetrated into the interior. In 1952, an Italian explorer went there and walked around alone for a few hours. The Sentinelese do not seem to be interested in Italians, either.
It should be obvious by now that the Sentinelese have no desire for the benefits of civilization (India), or for those of barbarism (England). They simply do not care at all about us. When we care about them, they rightly see such altruism as a patronizing insult. The whole world over, insults are punished more for their lack of tact than their actual content (remember too that the line between joke and insult is always opaque). And historically, things have not gone well for less protective peoples, to put it very mildly. Seeking to avoid disaster and genocide, the Sentinelese fire volleys of arrows and then disappear when anyone shows up. This is survival, homeland security. Get lost is a message even an American might understand.
But maybe not. Take the case of the late John Allen Chau, missionary, for example. His professed goal was to bring to the island the benevolence of the Protestant God. According to Chau’s diary, Old Paleface in the Sky has long loved His Sentinelese children from afar and has now decided in His infinite mercy to send an American to tell them so. Salvation is finally possible for this abstemious, prudent people. As no mass conversion to Calvinism happened on the mainland, off went the gormless Chau to spread Predestination and Limited Atonement to a population considerably smaller than India’s 1.438 billion. Whatever—if any—deity the Sentinelese worship was not pleased at all. Though his soul may have ascended, the earthly body of Apostle Chau was last seen lying on the sands, pierced like some Lutheran St Sebastian, on November 17 2018. There was a murder investigation, but neither India nor the US decided to press homicide charges against the islanders. This shows a wisdom of which the United States is seldom capable. It would be a difficult and dangerous warrant to serve. In any case, only a fool would volunteer, and then who could be found to deliver the next one? However, the fishermen who dropped off Chau were charged with trespassing on a state-protected reservation by the Indian government.
Seafarers are a reckless breed. In 2006, two fishermen ignored the warnings of other boats and maritime law and were killed while harvesting crabs illegally off the Sentinel coast. Their corpses were then strung up like scarecrows on the beach. A helicopter attempting to retrieve the bodies was driven off by arrows. A 1991 expedition to the island yielded a surprisingly peaceful exchange. Strangely, the act of physical contact with a Sentinelese became a heated contest among the anthropologists. Everyone in the expedition wanted to claim he had been the first to touch them or had been touched first, as if this were a trophy. Far more curiously, consider the moment of first contact: (There were) at least two dozen Sentinelese on the shoreline, one of whom pointed a bow and arrow at the party. Once a woman pushed the arrow down, the man buried his weapons in the sand and the Sentinelese approached quite close to the dinghies for the first time. It was a woman who decreed that communication would be nonviolent by pointing the warrior’s arrow to the ground. The greeting party then approached the foreigners unarmed. If the Sentinelese woman had not done this, the archers would certainly have attacked. Therefore she must wield the power of war, defense, strategy, and permissible relations with the outside world. Which shows where real power lies in this so-called primitive Paleolithic people.
Things have changed in anthropology and its associated disciplines. The academicians are no longer interested in getting native informants to confess and spill their secrets. The old Victorian evangelical overtone has died away. Now the academic machine is employed to redress the greatest of all rebuffs to the civilized world: the refusal of natives to show any interest in us whatsoever. This total disregard might be hard to see under the waves of arrows, but it must be admitted that such attacks remain for the most part largely symbolic. The projectiles are the last flickering vestiges of any Sentinelese curiosity about the men from over the waters. Soon they will not even bother to go and see what washes up on the shore, let alone waste an arrow. No weapon can beat such an absolute wall of mute impassivity, such impenetrable detachment—a monumental indigenous boredom which can only appear to their interrogators as the most grievous of all possible insults.
What can we learn from all this? That certain peoples, satisfied with the richness of their own ways of life, will not accept foreign riches. They are not interested in barter and trade. Their social organizations, games, legends, art and ways of love and death lack nothing. If they did, they would add to their store. How? Through contact. The Sentinelese have boats. Such technology may have been with them for millennia. And though it is very rare, they do apparently visit the other islands on the archipelago. They have also been known to ask for scrap metal to make knives. And they may have visited the mainland in the past. India has a vast civilized history [i], full of relations with peoples much farther afield than the present-day protectorate of the Bay of Bengal. Unlike the Royal Navy and the holy rollers, the Sentinelese do not overstay their welcome. At a certain point, they decided to wall themselves off as best they could, or a community of them decided so. Isolation should not always be considered an essentially conservative policy. Other things may be happening. Perhaps this is part of a greater project in time which we cannot comprehend. Perhaps it is an example of the Sentinelese sense of humor.
Do we have the right to ‘learn’ anything at all? Learning is done via gift or by accident. This gift of knowledge must be accepted and understood, taken in by a mutual pact between the outside world and the inner. Learning by accident involves chance and other mathematical laws that seem almost part of the realm of magic. The common phrase to come upon something describes the moment of accidental knowledge very well. In contrast, the right to learn about the world is an imperial decree, part of the fanaticism of Manifest Destiny. It must use force, coercion and conversion, theft, hostages, landgrabs. Empires are always fascinated by their subjects, recording their languages and customs, photographing them and arranging their genealogies, trying to make them instant relics. If the Sentinelese do not give, it is not because they do not understand the coconuts and Diet Cokes that have been left for them as pledges of the strangers’ good intentions. They kindly accept these objects, but have decided not to offer anything of themselves in return. That is, the Sentinelese prefer to withhold knowledge of themselves to the outsider. But they have given life back to some of these uninvited guests by withholding their arrows—which is a supreme example of hospitality and generosity of spirit, especially when confronting a burglar on the prowl.
[i] It should be remembered that English is an Indo-Iranian language, and that Latin is late-period derivative of Sanskrit.
"monumental indigenous boredom" is an almost universal view.