On an island in the Indian Ocean about the size of Manhattan, roughly 50 to 200 people known as the Sentinelese live in complete voluntary isolation — hunting with bows and arrows, speaking a language no outsider has ever understood, and killing every visitor who has come ashore, including an American missionary in 2018

On Saturday, 17 November 2018, at around 3:00 in the afternoon local time, a 26-year-old American evangelical missionary named John Allen Chau was killed on the eastern shore of North Sentinel Island by a group of between five and fifteen members of the indigenous community known as the Sentinelese. They shot him with multiple arrows shortly after he had landed on the beach from a small fishing boat. Chau had chartered the boat from local Indian fishermen in order to reach the island illegally, in violation of the Indian government’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Protection of Aboriginal Tribes) Regulation of 1956, which has forbidden outside contact with North Sentinel for nearly seventy years.

North Sentinel is an uninhabited 60-square-kilometre island in the Bay of Bengal, roughly the size of Manhattan, sitting about 50 kilometres west of Port Blair, the capital of the Indian Union Territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Chau was, by every available account of his own written preparations, aware that being killed was the most likely outcome of trying to land on it. His stated purpose in going anyway was to bring, in his own words from his final diary entries, “the gospel of Jesus Christ” to what he described as “Satan’s last stronghold on Earth.”

The specific human community that killed John Allen Chau on 17 November 2018 has been living on the specific island where he attempted to land for somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 years, and has, across essentially the entire recorded modern history of European colonial contact with the specific region of the Bay of Bengal in which the island is located, systematically declined every substantive attempt by outside cultural entities to make sustained contact with them. The Sentinelese people are descended from one of the earliest waves of anatomically modern human migration out of Africa across the substantial land-bridge routes that connected South Asia to the Andaman archipelago during the Pleistocene glacial maxima approximately 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. They speak a language that no living non-Sentinelese human being can currently understand, that has no established linguistic relationship to any other extant human language (including the closely-adjacent languages of the other Andamanese peoples — the Great Andamanese, the Onge, and the Jarawa — whose populations have, by contrast, been substantially reduced across the past 150 years by disease contact with the outside world), and that no external linguist has ever been able to progress beyond the initial phonemic inventory of. Their subsistence economy is substantially traditional hunter-gatherer: they hunt with bows and arrows (some of which incorporate iron arrowheads salvaged from shipwrecks that have washed onto their coast), fish in shallow coastal waters from narrow outrigger canoes, and gather forest foods from the dense tropical vegetation that covers essentially the entire interior of the island. Their current population is estimated by external observers at somewhere between 50 and 200 individuals — a substantially uncertain range that reflects the specific fact that no external observer has ever been permitted to conduct a systematic census.

The Sentinelese have progressively established, across approximately the past 150 years of documented external contact attempts, a substantially consistent pattern of hostile response to unauthorised landings on their island. As detailed in CNN’s contemporary November 2018 coverage of the specific circumstances of John Chau’s death and the broader history of Sentinelese external contacts, the pattern originated in the substantial trauma of the 1880 kidnapping of six Sentinelese individuals (two elderly adults and four children) by the British Royal Navy officer Maurice Vidal Portman, then the colonial administrator of the Andaman Islands, who transported the captives to Port Blair as anthropological specimens for study — where the two elderly adults died of common European infectious diseases within days of arrival, and the four surviving children were subsequently returned to North Sentinel with gifts and, essentially certainly, the substantial cross-contamination pathogens that Portman himself had exposed them to during their detention. Every subsequent substantive external landing on North Sentinel across the intervening 145 years has been met with progressive Sentinelese hostility — with the specific exception of a brief peaceful contact on 4 January 1991, when the Indian anthropologist Triloknath Pandit and a small research team were, for reasons the subsequent anthropological literature has not been able to fully reconstruct, permitted to approach the shore and hand out coconuts to unarmed Sentinelese who briefly waded into the surf to accept them, before the Sentinelese subsequently returned to shore and armed themselves and the encounter ended. No comparable peaceful contact has been permitted since. Three days after the 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that killed approximately 230,000 people across the surrounding coastal regions, an Indian Coast Guard helicopter sent to check on the Sentinelese was greeted by a lone archer firing arrows at the hovering aircraft — an image that has, in the two subsequent decades of accumulated photographic documentation of the Sentinelese, become one of the more iconic single photographic representations of the community.

What the American missionary was doing

The specific set of decisions that John Allen Chau made across the 2015-2018 period that culminated in his November 2018 death were, by every available account of his own extensive written preparations for the visit, substantially deliberate. As described in Doug Bock Clark’s long-form 2019 investigative reconstruction of John Allen Chau’s specific preparations for his North Sentinel mission, Chau — born in Scottsboro, Alabama in December 1991, raised in Vancouver, Washington, graduated from Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma in 2014 — had been progressively planning the Sentinelese mission since approximately his 2011 college years, had participated in specific missionary-training programmes conducted by the Kansas City-based evangelical organisation All Nations that included specific mock-encounter simulations in which staff members impersonated hostile tribespeople wielding fake spears, had made a preliminary Andaman Islands reconnaissance trip in 2015, and had returned to Port Blair in October 2018 with an “initial contact kit” containing picture cards for basic communication, small trade gifts (safety pins, footballs, a fish), and a specific set of medical supplies. He had been vaccinated against a range of infectious diseases and had voluntarily quarantined himself for several days before the mission to reduce the risk of pathogenic transmission to the Sentinelese. He had, per his own diary entries, contemplated his own probable death and had specifically requested that his body be left on the island rather than recovered, “buried in a spot known only to my Lord.” He had paid approximately 25,000 Indian rupees (approximately $325) to a group of five Indian fishermen and two Port Blair intermediaries to transport him to within swimming distance of the island’s shore in violation of the substantial Indian legal restrictions against doing so.

What happened after

The subsequent international response to the John Allen Chau killing was, per National Geographic Documentary Films’ 2023 documentary The Mission, directed by Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, substantially divided. Evangelical Christian organisations across multiple Protestant denominations described Chau as a Christian martyr in the specific tradition of the 1956 American missionary Jim Elliot (whose killing by the Huaorani people of Ecuador had substantially inspired Chau’s own missionary formation). The substantial majority of secular international press coverage described Chau as, at best, a substantially reckless young man whose specific religious convictions had produced his own probable-suicide-by-hostile-tribe, and, at worst, as a Christian imperialist whose specific attempted contact had risked introducing pathogens into a substantially disease-vulnerable indigenous population that had no acquired immunity to essentially any common respiratory illness. As reported in Rolling Stone’s review of the National Geographic documentary and its treatment of the specific ethical questions the Chau incident raised, the Indian government’s substantive administrative response was to formally close the case against the Sentinelese under the specific legal principle that the tribe’s right to isolation had been the substantive victim of Chau’s illegal landing rather than the reverse. The Indian Navy resumed the standard patrol coverage of the specific 5-kilometre exclusion zone surrounding North Sentinel Island. The five Indian fishermen and two Port Blair intermediaries who had transported Chau to the island were arrested and charged. The Sentinelese, of whom no external observer has since 17 November 2018 observed even a substantial single individual at close range, presumably continue to live on the same island where they have lived for the preceding several tens of thousands of years, and where they will presumably continue to live for whatever period of subsequent human history the specific Indian governmental commitment to their voluntary isolation remains substantively in effect.