Sri Vijaya Puram (India) (AFP) – One of the last outsiders to make authorised 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-kilometre (six-mile) wide island, covered in rainforest and ringed by coral reefs -- comes from the government missions.
Home of India's last "uncontacted" tribe © Nicholas SHEARMAN / AFP
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.Justin, himself from another group in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, recounted his first trip in 1986 to North Sentinel.'Eyes on, hands off'He waded through lagoon waters with saltwater crocodiles, landing on a white sand beach, carrying a sack of coconuts as a sign of goodwill."We saw smoke curling, emitting from the forest," said Justin, a former deputy director of the government's Anthropological Survey of India."After a few minutes, we saw the Sentinelese emerging from the forest," he added.The islanders, who government estimates put at 50 people and are designated a "Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group", made headlines in 2018 when they used bows and arrows to shoot dead an American missionary, John Allen Chau.
