American missionary John Allen Chau was shot and killed by a Sentinelese tribesperson on a remote island off of the Indian coast on Nov. 21. Chau was a devout Christian, and steadfast in his desire to spread the word of the gospel.
The Sentinelese are a tribe who, ever since British military arrived in the late 1800s to kidnap and kill several natives, have been hostile to outsiders entering their territory. Visitation to the island is outlawed, meaning Chau had to bribe fishermen to drop him off there. In a kayak, he paddled close to the island so he could talk to the locals.
At this point, Chau’s death seems almost a foregone conclusion. A remote ocean island, no contact with the outside world, aside from a fishing boat and a desire to get up-close-and-personal with a group of people who clearly want to be left alone, points in one singular direction. In regard to his own life, Chau’s actions were wildly foolish.
However, there is more nuance to the tribe’s off-limits zonation. The Sentinelese have been largely isolated over the past century or so, meaning they have not had any major contact with the globalized world. Their immune systems likely would have no defense against the diseases and bugs most humans now carry with them, leaving a high possibility of slow death by illness. In regard to the lives of others, Chau’s actions were fiendish.
To condemn a group of people to death by disease is truly reprehensible, but Chau believed he was doing good. Chau’s journal talks of his love for the world, his love for God and the Sentinelese people. The missionary ethos that drove Chau told him that he needed to spread the words of Jesus Christ to as many people as he could. In doing so, he would not only save his own soul, but possibly hundreds more. Chau brought gifts to the people, including a football and scissors, so he might better connect with and help them. In Chau’s world, as well as that of his faith, Chau was being as altruistic as possible.
Of course, Chau was not just living in his world, or even his god’s. Chau was living in everybody’s. He was living in the world of the Indian government, who had forbidden travel to North Sentinel Island to protect inhabitants and non-inhabitants alike. He was living in the world of intercontinental travel, which had allowed the brutalities of explorers and missionaries to affect indigenous peoples worldwide. He was invading the world of the disease-weak and hermetic Sentinelese.
While Chau himself may have said that he loved and respected the Sentinelese, his actions proved otherwise. His romantic, one-man mission to spread Christianity to the wilds of the Indian Ocean seemed to say that he did not care what the group had expressed to the outside world in the past, or even the potential health devastation his actions might wreak. To John Chau, his ideals stood higher than anything else. Chau valued the spiritual lives of the Sentinelese more than their actual lives.
That said, my goal is not to condemn Chau, or even his culturally-imperialist mission. Rather, it is to condemn his mindset and refusal to critically think. Clearly, there were good reasons to avoid North Sentinel Island. If Chau had looked into the past and seen the Sentinelese people’s history with outsiders, he might have stayed away. If he had looked at scientific reasoning behind the ban, he might have instead sent a germ-free Bible floating over.
Had Chau really given some thought to perspectives other than his own, he might have avoided his own death and spared the Sentinelese the current media circus and the possibility of early death. By ignoring the advice and desires of others in favor of his own, Chau killed himself and gave an entire culture of people a brush with death.
Of course, this story is not quite over, and this piece itself involves a fair amount of speculation. Maybe Chau did consider all those things and he viewed his mission as more important. Maybe Chau has killed the entire population of North Sentinel Island and the effects of disease just have not begun in earnest yet.
When those same nineteenth-century British soldiers abandoned their experiment with the Sentinelese, one wrote that “We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers.”
The Brits, unlike Chau, had the opportunity to see that their absolute dedication to their own desires and nobody else’s had caused nothing but harm. If I might rephrase a proverb, the road to a shallow grave in the middle of the Indian Ocean is paved with good intentions.
Purity of belief is not enough to ensure the validity of your own actions, so it is important to consider different points of view, however good and right you might think you are. Surely, a little bit of forethought, painful though it may be, is worth avoiding the sting of a (metaphorical) arrow in the chest.