If you’re like me and are fascinated by geography – I would pore over maps and atlases as a kid, always finding something new and interesting, as if they were telenovelas – then you may be familiar with North Sentinel Island and its residents, the Sentinelese, one of the last ‘uncontacted’ tribes on earth. The island is part of the Andaman archipelago in the eastern Indian Ocean, and is part of India, which patrols the waters around the island and prohibits anyone from landing on the island or trying to contact the Sentinelese, who have in fact been contacted, but very rarely, and in the last few decades only by sanctioned anthropologists … and one very deluded American.
John Chau was 25 years old and a rabid fundamentalist Christian who believed in the nonsense doctrine that anyone who had never heard the Gospel would be condemned to hell. He read about the Sentinelese people online – how he first learned about them isn’t entirely clear – and decided that God wanted him to go preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to them. The Sentinelese are extremely hostile to outsiders, and a few years prior had killed two fisherman whose boat drifted ashore on their island. Chau made several visits to the Andamans and approached North Sentinel Island several times, making contact with its people, before they finally killed him too – sparking mockery online of this idiot colonizer breaking several Indian laws to go shout, in English, to people who wouldn’t understand him, about his own superstitions, even though these people are well known to shoot arrows at anyone who comes near their shores.
The Mission, a new documentary from National Geographic, tells some of Chau’s story, exploring his life to try to answer the question of why a seemingly intelligent young man, raised in some privilege, would do such a profoundly stupid – and likely suicidal – thing. It’s riveting and infuriating, a severe indictment of the evangelical circles in which John traveled and the various people who enabled him to do this illegal, dangerous, and frankly inhumane thing, but I don’t think it adequately answers that fundamental question of why.
The North Sentinelese have good reason to fear and loathe outsiders. They were targets for slavers who saw the Andaman peoples, many of whom appear to be descendants of African migrants from several millennia prior, as chattel. British colonial authorities would take a break from subjugating what is now India and Pakistan to treat the Andamanese as a sort of circus freaks, with one measuring the sizes of their crania and genitals in the name of “science.” Any contact with people from beyond the islands also introduced the Sentinelese to pathogens to which they had no immunity. Since Partition & independence, India’s government has largely protected the tribes of the Andamans, some of which have chosen, in a way, to assimilate with broader Indian society, while the Sentinelese remain apart.
Where The Mission succeeds is in its depiction of the history of Christian missionaries trying to convert these ‘lost’ tribes, including an endeavor in Ecuador in the 1950s where the Huaorani tribe killed five white missionaries, but further efforts eventually led to the conversion of many tribe members and the subsequent deterioration of their culture. One of the experts who talks on camera is the linguist and former missionary Daniel Everett, who went to the Amazon to convert the Pirahã with his wife and children, but after several years lost his faith and became an ardent atheist, giving him a unique perspective on Chau’s religious mania and willingness to ignore all voices telling him not to do this terrible, dangerous thing. The film also interviews several of Chau’s enablers, including one group that specifically targets these uncontacted or low-contact tribes to spread the Gospel, regardless of impact on the people involved or risks to the missionaries, coming off very much like members of a cult. (Their leader claimed he posed no threat to the Sentinelese because we have antibiotics.)
Where The Mission falls a little short is in depicting Chau as anything more than a very naïve evangelical who started down this missionary path and didn’t seem able or willing to stop until he hit the bottom. His father is a psychiatrist who nearly lost his license for reasons that are only hinted at in the film, while his mother was the evangelical parent yet is barely mentioned here. It’s clear that at least some of his fervor came from his time at Oral Roberts University, one of the most evangelical and also one of the most homophobic/transphobic colleges in America, including one man, Bobby Parks, who was “Missions/Outreach Coordinator” at ORU until 2016 and still runs a nonprofit that uses soccer as a way to indoctrinate kids in refugee camps and other high-risk areas around the world. Parks appears to have been a Svengali to Chau, yet he declined requests to appear in the documentary or speak to its makers, so his exact role and level of influence is only implied. So how Chau went from a good student with a strong interest in the outdoors to a stark raving madman who hatched an intense months-long plan to invade North Sentinel Island remains unanswered.
I suppose my views on Chau and such efforts are quite clear, and I think he was both an aggressor and a victim here. I knew Chau’s story from this 2018 Outside story, which appeared in my links roundup on November 24th of that year, and which I think goes a little more into his own personal journey and at least asks more questions about how he got to that kayak in the Indian Ocean. (This Guardian story has more.) I know the documentary just left me fuming at how willing others were to waste Chau’s life, and how easily he fell into this downward spiral, where even his Christian faith, one founded on respect and love for one’s fellow man, led him to disregard the significant dangers he posed to the very people he was trying to save.