Free Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies by Alastair Bonnett Page A

Telegrams
, declared FIRST FRIENDLY CONTACT WITH SENTINELESE . The story told how, having left the usual offering on the shore—in this case a bag of coconuts—and retreated to their motor launch, officials had witnessed the Sentinelese coming out of the forest to collect them. The sensation was that this time they came unarmed. In the afternoon the Indians went back and found more than two dozen native people waiting for them. The visitors observed a small but telling incident: a young woman walked over to a young man who was pointing his loaded bow at the strangers and with her hand she pushed his arrow down. The man then buried the weapon in the sand. Pleased with the way things were going, one of the officials, the director of tribal welfare, decided to celebrate by throwing numerous coconuts to the assembled crowd. These seem to have been well received. The only person who can claim even superficial knowledge of the Sentinelese, the Indian anthropologist T. N. Pandit, explained to a reporter in 1993, “They may not have chiefs but a decision had obviously been taken by the Sentinelese to be friendly towards us. We still don’t know how or why.”
    The nascent relationship didn’t last long. In 1996 trips to North Sentinel came to a stop, and since then the islanders have been left alone. The Indian policy of noncontact was bolstered the following year by a bad experience with another previously uncontacted and once hostile tribe, the Jarawa, on the island of Main Andaman. The “Jarawa crisis” started in late 1997 when, having been encouraged to come out of their forest seclusion, the Jarawa upset local mores by wandering naked into villages and taking whatever goods they wished. They also became prey to sexual exploitation and measles, a disease that today threatens the tribe with extinction. Contact with the Jarawa had created a headache that the authorities didn’t want again.
    Stephen Corry, the director of the indigenous rights charity Survival, estimated in 2007 that there are 107 “largely uncontacted tribes in the world.” But, he adds, “they remain separate because they choose to, and with good reason.” Although hidden tribes are usually associated with the Amazon jungles, nearly half of the world’s known uncontacted groups are in West Papua, on the island of New Guinea. Many of these people are in flight or in hiding from the army and settlers from Indonesia, which treats West Papua like a colonial fiefdom. The result of contact for these hidden peoples would, at the very best, be cultural decay, but another probable outcome would be death through disease and assault. Another likely fate is for these peoples to become the object of touristic curiosity. “First contact for cash” is one of the holiday options adventuresome tourists in West Papua can opt for. Clients are taken deep into the jungle and often allowed to freely mix with “uncontacted” and “absolutely primitive cultures.” A BBC interview with a “first contact” expedition leader in 2006 allowed him to make his pitch and to provide an ethical justification. Anyone and everyone, he says, should “have the right to see these kind of people.” Given the tragic history of such contact, it’s a grotesque kind of right. No one knows if the Sentinelese are aware of other indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands or what has happened to them. Today such groups make up no more than 1 percent of the population. The names of the many dead tribes form a litany of lost sounds: Aka-Bea, Akar-Bale, A-Pucikwar, Aka-Kol, Aka-Kede, Oko-Juwoi, Aka-Jeru, Aka-Kora, Aka-Cari, Aka-Bo.
    The fact that the Sentinelese don’t care for strangers was driven home again in 2006 when they killed two fishermen. Sunder Raj and Pandit Tiwari had anchored offshore but during the night their open-topped boat drifted onto the beach. In the early morning other fishermen shouted to them, to try to wake them, but got no response—reports later suggested that