-Caveat Lector-

--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], "Tom Wheeler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hello, You Must Be Going

By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 7, 2000; Page C02

Maybe I'm a sick puppy but I was thrilled to learn that there is at
least
one tropical island left on this beleaguered planet where naked,
unconquered
natives still greet anthropologists and other emissaries of our
so-called
civilization with a barrage of arrows.

It is North Sentinel Island, a tiny speck in the Indian Ocean.
Technically
it's owned by India but--as Adam Goodheart explains in an
extraordinary
story in the autumn issue of American Scholar--nobody has conquered
the
inhabitants. Somehow, the Sentinelese understand what American Indians
learned too late: Give these outsiders an inch of land and they'll
steal
everything.

Perhaps they acquired their distaste for foreigners in 1858, when the
British settled Great Andaman Island, 30 miles away, and promptly set
up
that characteristic bastion of Western civilization--a penal colony.

In 1867, a merchant ship wrecked on the reef near North Sentinel
Island and
survivors made their way to shore, only to be driven off by small
naked men
firing arrows.

In 1896, a convict escaped from the penal colony on a raft and landed
on the
beach at North Sentinel. A few days later a search party found his
body
festooned with arrows.

"After this," Goodheart writes dryly, "the island was left alone for
nearly
a century."

In 1974, outsiders arrived again, this time in the form of a boat
filled
with documentary filmmakers, anthropologists, a National Geographic
photographer and some armed cops. Approaching the island, they saw
natives
emerge from the woods.

"The anthropologists made friendly gestures," Goodheart writes. "The
Sentinelese responded with a hail of arrows."

The outsiders landed their dinghy out of arrow range, dropped some
cheap
trinkets on the beach and retreated offshore to observe the natives'
reaction.

"The natives' reaction was to fire more arrows, one of which hit the
film
director in the left thigh," Goodheart writes. "The man who had shot
the
film director was observed laughing proudly."

And so it went. Occasionally some brave or foolish outsiders would
approach
the island and drop off some gifts--usually coconuts--only to be
driven off
by arrows. Finally, in 1991, a group of Indian officials managed to
land on
the island and hand out coconuts without being shot, inspiring the
Andaman
Island newspaper to run a story headlined: "First Friendly Contact
With
Sentinelese."

But the natives made it very clear that--as their lawyer might put it
if
they had a lawyer--acceptance of free coconuts in no way implies
acceptance
of visitors. And soon the visits stopped.

Goodheart, a Washington writer, learned the bare bones of this tale
while
browsing the Internet. Fascinated, he followed the story to India,
where he
interviewed an anthropologist who'd briefly met the Sentinelese, then
to
Grand Andaman, where he observed the pathetic fate of the natives
there, and
finally to a small boat off the coast of North Sentinel Island, where
he
watched a few Sentinelese on the shore.

"One of them was holding something long and thin," he writes. Maybe it
was a
spear. Maybe a bow. Goodheart was smart enough--and, yes, goodhearted
enough--not to try and find out.

His long, superbly written story is fascinating. Read and enjoy it but
please, don't go hustling off to North Sentinel Island to pester the
natives. They don't want to meet you and they keep their arrows sharp.

*************************************************
Alternative Press Review  -  www.altpr.org
Your Guide Beyond the Mainstream
PO Box 4710  -  Arlington, VA 22204

Mid-Atlantic Infoshop  -  www.infoshop.org
Infoshop News Kiosk - www.infoshop.org/news.html

"Our first work must be the annihilation of everything
as it now exists."  -  Mikhail Bakunin

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed,
debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own."  -  No.6
--- End forwarded message ---




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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dancing on strings held by the Illuminist bolsheviks of
Silicon Valley. Dendrites snap...neurons decay...axons are
reduced to a thin white gruel, a paste that was once a
living mind.

http://www.merlin.org
http://www.mediachannel.org/views/oped/neo.shtml
http://www.ddh.nl/nwd/2000/index-eng.html

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