One of the last tribes of "uncivilized" people just wants to be left alone, and will kill anyone who comes on their land in order to impress on the rest of the world their not-too-subtle message.
From the terrific little blog, Bad Ass of the Week, comes this little story of North Sentinel Island, in the Andaman Islands.
Put the Bad Ass of the Week blog in your feed: I'm, glad I did.
Deep in the Bay of Bengal, somewhere between Indonesia and India, is a heavily-jungled island roughly 20% larger than Manhattan, New York. Canopy forests circled by large sandy beaches, this mysterious place has no natural harbors, is completely surrounded by ship-disintegrating coral reefs, and has been almost completely untouched by human civilization sinec the dawn of mankind. To this day, it is illegal for anyone to set foot on this ultra-remote would-be paradise – the Coast Guard of India maintains a 3-mile cordon around the island.
This cordon is there for your protection. Because while this miniscule speck of land in the Indian Ocean may appear to be completely uninhabited, it is in fact home to one of the last civilizations on earth about which we know absolutely fucking nothing.
This is North Sentinel Island. And the tribal people that live there have a long-standing policy – if you set foot on our island, we will kill the shit out of you, slit your throat, dump your corpse on the beach, and then disappear into the jungle. We don't negotiate. We don't make friends. We don't make treaties. We defend our fucking island to the death.
To this day, in the Golden Age of Google Maps and Other Crazy Satellite Robot Drone Shit, the only photographs you will ever see of the North Sentinelese people were taken either from an aircraft or a boat. There is no living person on the planet right now who has set foot in those jungles and lived to tell the tale. Not only can we not decipher their spoken language, but it bears no resemblance to any spoken language of any civilization in existence. ...
We think there are somewhere between 50 and 400 of them, but we don’t know because no satellite imagery can see through the canopy jungle on the heart of the island. They have no agriculture that we know of. We know they gather coconuts on the beach, go fishing in wooden canoes, and friggin’ spear-hunt for turtles, birds, and goddamn wild warthogs. They can’t create fire, but they can use it. They haven’t invented oars (they use long poles to push their canoes along), but – get this – they fucking created iron-tipped arrows by hacking off scrap metal from a goddamn British ship that wrecked there in 1981.
1 comment:
This must be very bad for tourism.
"We don't want you and we don't want your "help" "
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