SRI VIJAYA PURAM: One of the last outsiders to make authorized visits to India’s only “uncontacted” tribe says it may be time to reconnect with the isolated people — in order to shield them from an encroaching world.
Anthropologist Anstice Justin, 71, took part in the government’s limited contact missions to the restricted North Sentinel island in the Andaman Sea between 1986 and 2004.
The island’s inhabitants are famously resistant to engaging with outsiders, and even killed a US missionary who made an illegal visit in 2018.
What little is known about the Sentinelese — who live on the 10-kilometer (six-mile) wide island, covered in rainforest and ringed by coral reefs — comes from the government missions.
But even those trips resulted in extremely limited understanding of the people. “We don’t even know how they identify themselves,” Justin told AFP on the main Andaman Island — a different world, but just two hours away by boat.
