Uncontacted tribes are under threat from developers, extractors… and influencers

Welcome to the Sensemaker, our daily newsletter. It features calm and clear analysis on the stories driving the news across tech, politics, finance, culture and more. The Sensemaker will appear here every morning, but to receive it in your email inbox, sign up on our newsletters page.

A US YouTuber has been arrested, freed on bail and ordered to remain in India after he visited an uncontacted tribe on a restricted island and left them a can of Coke as a ‘peace offering’.

So what? Mykhailo Polyakov can count himself lucky. Seven years earlier, an American missionary was killed when he tried to convert the islanders to Christianity. In the intervening years the Sentinelese people, the most isolated tribe in the world, have also cemented their status as the most famous. But they are not alone.

They are one of more than 100 uncontacted groups facing increased attention from

• influencers, who seek out forbidden parts of the world in the search of adventure and virality; as well as
• developers and extractors, from nickel miners in the home of the Hongana Manwaya in Indonesia to loggers on the land of the Mashco Piro in Peru.

The trespasser. Polyakov runs a budding YouTube channel under the name ‘Neo-Orientalist’. His six videos document his travels straight through Afghanistan following its takeover by the Taliban. A viewer can only guess who would have been in video seven.

The destination. North Sentinel Island is in India’s Andaman chain. Heavily forested, the only signs of life on Google Earth are a shipwreck and faint tracks leading from the shore to the trees. But under the canopies are somewhere between 15 and 200 people.

The people. Directly descended from the first human populations to migrate out of Africa, the Sentinelese are thought to have lived in the Andaman Islands for tens of thousands of years. They have gone mainly, but not always, undisturbed.

• In 1879, an elderly couple and four children were kidnapped by a colonial officer and brought to the main town in the Andaman Islands. The couple grew sick and died; the unwell children were sent back with ‘gifts’.
• In 1991, the first and only safe contact with the Sentinelese was made by a 13-member team who handed over coconuts. India abandoned such expeditions three years later, mainly due to the hostility they received.
• In 2004, a helicopter flew low over North Sentinel for a welfare check in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed more than 230,000 people and cut a path straight through the island. A lone tribe member shot an arrow at the helicopter.
• In 2018, 26-year-old John Allen Chau paid fishermen to take him to the island, having read about the Sentinelese on a missionary database. Chau shouted at the tribe: “Jesus loves you.” A few days later, the fishermen saw his body being buried on the beach.

Then came last month. No one is allowed within three miles of North Sentinel, but this didn’t stop Polyakov, who repeatedly blew a whistle before reaching land. He didn’t meet the tribe, but left a coconut and a Diet Coke. He was arrested and now faces five years in prison.

He must be crazy. Polyakov’s actions have more than a faint echo of the controversial 1982 comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy, in which a tribe discovers an empty Coca-Cola bottle dropped from an airplane and thinks it must have been sent from on high.

He must be selfish. Caroline Pearce from Survivor International called Polyakov “reckless” and not only about his own safety. “Even very simple infections can sweep through populations,” she said. The Sentinelese are likely to have no immunity even to common illnesses such as flu.

On a mission. The explosion of social media means “you are seeing more of these adventure tourist types”, said Pearce. But she thinks it was the death of Chau specifically that accelerated the online interest in uncontacted people.

The eye of the storm. This attention has been compounded by the wider rise of ‘dark tourism’, an industry forecast to hit nearly £35 billion by 2033. It has been spearheaded by thrillseekers travelling to warzones. Several companies offer tours of Bucha, the Kyiv suburb where Russia killed hundreds of civilians and prisoners of war in 2022.

Whose land? It is not just adventurers that tribes have to worry about. On Great Nicobar, 300 miles south of North Sentinel, India is planning to build a container port, airport and military base as part of a £7 billion project that could attract a million visitors a year. Survival International warns the development could wipe out the Shompen, an indigenous group who live on the island.

What’s more… Already gone are the Bo, a tribe who numbered about 5,000 when the British colonised the Andaman Islands in 1858. Fifteen years ago, the last member died.

Photo credit: Alamy Images