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(DELHI) - In recent days, Indian officials have visited the remote island several times, where an American missionary was killed by people who have long resisted the outside world. But they have not set foot on North Sentinel Island since the murder, and we do not know if they will.
"They are a treasure," said Dependera Pathak, chief executive officer of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands groups, about the sentinel people. "We can not go and force our way in. We do not want to hurt them."
The Sentinels, who according to scholars are descendants of Africans who emigrated to the region about 50,000 years ago, survive on the small forested island by hunting, fishing and gathering wild plants. We know almost nothing of their lives, if it is that they attack the aliens with spears, bows and arrows.
The American John Allen Chau was killed by islanders in mid-November after paying fishermen to smuggle him to the island, where Indian law forbids him to strangers. The fishermen told the authorities that they had seen the Sentinels bury Chau's body on the beach.
A boat carrying police and other officers approached North Sentinel on Friday and Saturday, watching the sentries with binoculars. On Saturday, members of the tribe were armed with spears, bows and arrows, but they did not attempt to shoot at them, said Pathak.
"We watched them from a distance and they watched us from a distance," he said.
The officials have not given up on recovering the body, he said. But they are very cautious and are studying an incident in 2006, in which fishermen whose boat had drifted on the island had been killed.
"We are looking closely at what happened at the time and what the Sentinels did," he said. "We consult anthropologists to see what kind of friendly gesture we can do."
The islanders buried the two fishermen on the beach in 2006, but unearthed the bodies after a few days and kept them standing. The authorities have apparently never found these bodies and the murders have not been investigated.
There has been no significant contact with the Sentinelese for generations. Anthropologists sometimes deposited coconut and banana gifts, but even these visits were stopped years ago.
