Interestingly this and other killings are where the myth that murder is legal on the island come from. The last known person to attempt to contact them was an American by the name of John Allen Chau, a missionary who wished to visit the island and spread the word of God. No one was prosecuted, and the official policy of leaving the islanders be was continued.
In 2006, two Indian fishermen illegally fishing in the waters just off North Sentinel were killed by the islanders. With the official government policy being that people are not allowed to visit North Sentinel Island, the locals have been left to get on with things, right? Not quite.
The Sentinelese were greatly affected by the 2004 tsunami, in which it was estimated that half of their population were wiped out. In 1997 the Indian government made the decision to stop any and all people visiting the island, and let the locals live in seclusion. Since then only one visit has been successful – that of an Indian Anthropological Survey director and his colleagues, who visited without violence on January 4 th, 1991. This never ended very well, and plenty of people died before everybody decided it might be best if the North Sentinelese were left to their own devices. As was the wont of said Empire, the British visited several times in a bid to bring a bit of good old-fashioned ‘civilisation’ to the locals. In the past, North Sentinel fell under the remit of the British Empire. To say that they’re hostile to outside contact would be quite the understatement. On North Sentinel Island, the ‘locals’ are one of a handful of remaining uncontacted peoples on earth. They feature a stunningly diverse ecology and are very ethnically diverse. Overall, the islands are rather pleasant to visit and popular with tourists. North Sentinel Island is part of the Andaman Islands, a bunch of islands owned and administered by India. North Sentinel Island is one of those places. Young Pioneer Tours are famous for taking people to ‘places your mother would rather you stayed away from’, but there are some places that, regardless of what your mother thinks, you really shouldn’t go to.
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