One thing that leaps out at me from this amazing, fascinating thread: How much of the chatter about the people of North Sentinel Island has assumed that the community has no history.
The assumption that neolithic peoples live outside of time and history is incredibly widespread. "Incredibly," because a moment's thought will make clear that the assumption is false, must be false.
What @RespectableLaw has written in this thread is the halting, fragmentary start to a history of the Sentinelese people over the last 150 years.
When you frame it that way—as "a history of the Sentinelese people over the last 150 years"—it immediately becomes obvious how partial and inadequate it is, right?
Because the vast majority of what would make up such a history is unknown to outsiders. There are volumes that could be written—untold hours worth of stories that are being told on that island right now—that the rest of us can have no access to.
What happened to John Allen Chau was historically contingent. It was shaped not only by interactions between the Sentinelese and outsiders over the last 150 years (and, presumably, beyond), but by historical forces on the island as well.
A lot of people don't get as far as "if Chau had coughed on one of these people he just might have wound up kiling them all" in their understanding, but even that is basically square one.
We talk a lot in my classes about how the survival strategies of cultural minorities get warped and distorted when they're described by members of dominant cultures, and popular discussions around Chau's death are (among other things) that ramped up by orders of magnitude.
