Some practices seem odd and inhumane, but can these practices be called so, when the people involved have limited contact with the outside world and live in a world with new definitions of right and wrong?
The Sentinelese tribe, for instance, are an Indian tribe who live on North Sentinel Island, which is a territory of India and they have almost no contact with the outside world.
This means no technology and no English. They speak their own language and have their own rules. It is known that the island is off-limits for visitors, especially without the proper permissions, and trespassers are caught and killed.
The tribe is isolated and cut off from the rest of India, and even the Indian government does not include Sentinelese in its census. The residents are only counted based on photos captured from afar. In 1991, they were numbered to be about 117, but in 2011, they were numbered to be about 15 in total.
The Sentinelese tribe are known to be hunter-gatherers and surveys of the island have shown no evidence of agriculture. This means that they seem to get their food from fishing, hunting, and collecting wild plants which live on the island.
Also, despite rumours of them being cannibals, evidence has proved otherwise. One such evidence was an analysis by the Indian government in 2006 after the death of two fishermen. Their corpses were found, meaning the Sentinelese people do not eat human bodies.
The first contact was with the Sentinelese made by the British in the late 1800s, when, despite their attempts to hide, six individuals from the tribe were captured and taken to the main island of the Andaman Island archipelago.
Two captured adults died of illness while the four children were returned — perhaps also infected with illnesses that the islanders’ immune systems were unequipped to deal with.
Except for a brief, friendly interaction in the early 1990s, they have fiercely resisted contact with outsiders, even following disaster.
In 2004, following the Asian tsunami that devastated the Andaman chain, a member of the tribe was photographed on a beach on the island, firing arrows at a helicopter sent to check on their welfare.
Two years later, members of the tribe killed two poachers who had been illegally fishing in the waters surrounding their home island, North Sentinel Island, after their boat drifted ashore, according to Survival International, a nonprofit dedicated to the protection of isolated tribal groups, which calls the tribe the “world’s most isolated.”
