Imagine you're marooned on an island. You've scraped together enough food and water to survive, but you have a toothache. You need to see a dentist soon. You see planes fly above you, and ships sail past. They see you, but they don't stop to help. They're worried they might infect you with Covid-19. And they see you have plenty of food and water; in fact, your diet of wild berries and turtles is probably healthier than the dollar menu at MacDonald's, they reason. And for all they know, you chose to live on an island. Who are they to judge your way of life?
It seems fanciful, but now imagine you're a Sentinel Islander, and suddenly it's not so far-fetched. The Sentinelese are one of more than a hundred "uncontacted peoples" in the world today—neolithic tribes of indigenous people who inhabit secluded corners of the Earth, with no communication with the developed world.[1] The conventional wisdom is that uncontacted peoples should remain uncontacted. I disagree.
My comparison is imperfect, to be sure, because uncontacted peoples generally don't want, or need, to be "rescued." The Sentinelese, in fact, will resist any attempts at contact with brutal violence. It would be patronizing for us to think of ourselves as their "saviors."
But I do think of them as fellow humans, and as a humanist I feel I have a duty to them to prevent unnecessary suffering—if I can. And despite how many people fetishize the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of uncontacted peoples, it is a hard, hard life. The incomparable Christopher Hitchens used to say that, for the first 100,000 years of our pre-agrarian existence, "our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth."[2]
In 2011, there was a highly-publicized case of a 24-year-old man who died of a tooth infection in the United States because he couldn't afford antibiotics.[3] Americans were right to be horrified and outraged at this story. But where is the horror and the outrage at the untold suffering of uncontacted peoples without access to modern medicine, "dying of their teeth," as Hitchens put it, or of other preventable diseases, such as cholera and leprosy? All of these are terrible ways to die, yet we condemn hundreds of men, women, and children to this cruel fate out of a conviction that, for various reasons, we must not interfere.
What are these reasons?
The first and foremost has to do with disease. "Isolated tribes rarely have immunity to pathogens brought by outsiders," writes Kerry Bowman of the University of Toronto, "and the Indigenous population in South America has been decimated by disease since first contact with European colonists." He is right, of course.
But the problem is, we're already having contact with the uncontacted, whether we want to or not. As Bowman himself points out, in Peru and Brazil, "loggers, miners, narco-traffickers, and hunters... enter protected areas almost at will," exposing indigenous peoples to deadly diseases. Not only that, but some altercations with uncontacted peoples have resulted in violence; Bowman points to a 2017 incident in which 10 indigenous tribespeople were massacred by illegal gold miners—so-called garimpeiros—in Brazil.[4]
Is this the contact we want indigenous peoples to have with our world? And what of John Chau, the "extreme" Christian would-be missionary who was killed approaching Sentinel Island in 2018?[5] Is he the sort of person we want to be our self-appointed ambassador to the Sentinelese? Chau and the garimpeiros aren't just bad actors, they are the representatives of the modern world to uncontacted peoples. (It's no wonder they may prefer isolation!)
Bowman points to "western cultures' long and tragic history with Indigenous contact," but we are only perpetuating that tragic history with incidents such as these.
Another reason Bowman suggests we must leave uncontacted peoples alone is that such peoples "are protecting some of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and in turn creating an important counterpoint to climate change." For one thing, I'm uncomfortable with blithely using indigenous peoples as a means to an end, as Bowman commends us to do. But moreover, the Amazon can and should be preserved and protected regardless of whether indigenous people reside there. We shouldn't need to hide behind indigenous people as a convenient excuse to take climate action.
Bowman concludes, "I believe the only ethical position with contact is to allow the uncontacted to make the decision." I entirely agree, but it must be an informed decision. Uncontacted peoples cannot decide whether to accept or reject modern medicine if they don't know what modern medicine is. I maintain that few people who are dying of a tooth infection would choose to forgo pain relievers and antibiotics, if given such a choice. It is unspeakably cruel of us to deny this choice to uncontacted peoples.
What is needed, in my view, is an organized campaign of friendly contact and inoculation. A cultural exchange must take place, in which indigenous peoples can freely choose which way of life they prefer. If it's the case that they would knowingly stay in isolation, I would respect that informed decision. But we are, in effect, making the decision for them by perpetuating their ignorance.
In 2018, rare footage was captured of "the world's loneliest man," an uncontacted tribesman who has been surviving alone in the Amazon since his entire tribe was murdered by Brazilian farmers 25 years ago.[6] Imagine you are that man. Imagine learning that you needn't have been lonely and fearful all those years. Imagine feeling that the entire world had betrayed you, and left you to die alone out of a patronizing belief that "it's what you want" or "it's what's best for you."
Let him decide for himself.
[1] https://www.utoronto.ca/news/should-we-contact-uncontacted
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/919133-let-s-say-that-the-consensus-is-that-our-species-being
[3] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/insurance-24-year-dies-toothache/story?id=14438171
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/aug/22/alleged-massacre-of-amazon-tribespeople-javari-valley-brazil
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/03/john-chau-christian-missionary-death-sentinelese
[6] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-44901055