"They
are a treasure," Dependera Pathak, director-general of police on the Andaman
and Nicobar island groups, said of the Sentinelese people. "We cannot go
and force our way in. We don't want to harm them."
The
Sentinelese, who scholars believe are descendants of Africans who migrated to
the area about 50,000 years ago, survive on the small, forested island by
hunting, fishing and gathering wild plants. Almost nothing is known of their
lives, except that they attack outsiders with spears or bows and arrows.
American
John Allen Chau was killed by islanders in mid-November after paying fishermen
to smuggle him to the island, where outsiders are effectively forbidden by
Indian law. The fishermen told authorities that they saw the Sentinelese bury
Chau's body on the beach.
A boat
carrying police and other officials approached North Sentinel on Friday and
Saturday, watching the Sentinelese through binoculars. On Saturday the
tribesmen were armed with spears and bows and arrows, but they did not attempt
to shoot them at the authorities, Pathak said.
"We
watched them from a distance and they watched us from a distance," he
said.
Officials
have not given up on recovering the body, he said. But they are moving very
gingerly, studying a 2006 incident in which fishermen whose boat drifted onto
the island were killed.
"We
are looking carefully at what happened then, and what (the Sentinelese)
did," he said. "We are consulting anthropologists to see what kind of
friendly gesture we can make."
The
islanders buried the two fishermen on the beach in 2006, but dug up the corpses
after a few days and propped them upright. Authorities apparently never
recovered those bodies, and the killings were never investigated.
There has
been no significant contact with the Sentinelese for generations.
Anthropologists used to occasionally drop off gifts of coconuts and bananas,
but even those visits were stopped years ago..
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