Thread for the discussion, analysis and news regarding the savage and primitive barely contacted North Sentinel Island hunter gatherer people.
Think of it as geopolitics applied to the iron age.
Current population: ≈15 - 500
News:
https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/tribes/sentinelesehttps://www.ndtv.com/topic/north-sentinel-islandhttps://www.hindustantimes.com/topic/north-sentinel-island/newsLatest developments:
-In April 2025, a YouTuber, Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, was arrested after staging an attempt to contact the tribe. He trespassed, left a can of Diet Coke and a coconut, and may face significant prison time.
79 posts and 11 image replies omitted.>>2448112I'm not really arguing about when colonization happens and why. I am addressing this point here that colonization was ultimately a good thing because it ended up with some infrastructure being built.
>>2448114Cool, you've given up on arguing. Cool conversation thanks for the fun.
>>2448127Oh I see what you mean. I thought your original comment was two separate statements. Well, I just disagree. I don't think death acceptance has any connection whatsoever with rolling over and surrendering, whether it is to an invading force, someone in your life, or whatever.
Also my reference to the colonialism arguments was in reference to the other users in this conversation, not you specifically.
>>2447722>AutonomistIf you think this is about autonomism you're sadly not even close to grasping what I'm getting at. The medicalisation and pathologizing of behaviors, appearances, and lack of "want", is already an issue in today's materially advanced societies.
This isn't about whether giving them diet cokes ruins their perfect noble savage culture. It's about what the supposed problem is, what people think they're "fixing", and whether they actually understand both what they're proposing and the basis of their worldview.
A lot of people, including here, are too caught up with the idea that 'material' progress is synonymous with social progress.
E.g. the Soviet Union was miserable and poor because most people didn't have cars (lib take). Ignoring the part where car ownership was mostly unnecessary, and you could live your whole live without ever driving one. Or people forget the part about how the rapid industrialization of the USSR was hardly a choice, because they knew the capitalist powers were going to try and destroy them again like they had been trying from the start.
If they felt they had centuries to figure things out, and didn't need to immediately address the widespread destruction and famine in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, they could very well have taken a different approach. But we'll never know because the Bolsheviks inherited a gigantic impoverished country suffering recurrent famines and warlordism, and they correctly understood that another war was on the horizon.
>RantingI don't think you know what a rant is.
>>2463973Yeah that’s pretty much true. Before British conquest, Andaman natives numbered in the thousands. “Breaking them out” of what? It’s not a prison. They made the choice to live that way. And compared to other Andaman tribes, some of which are definitely going to go extinct in our lifetime, that strategy has worked out for them. The North Sentinalese want to live this way and its working out for them. The Jarawa were very aggressive and isolationist but breaking isolation had harmful effects on them.
This strategy of “fleeing from modernity” isn’t unusual. Millions of people do it. Many communities throughout Asia choose to avoid the state or keep away from outsiders to maintain their lifestyles. It’s pretty common in the highlands of Burma, Vietnam, and Laos, as well as Afghanistan, North Western Pakistan, Tibet, and Iran’s Baluchistan region. The North Sentinelese are an extreme case because they are on a remote island surrounded by water that nobody really needed to visit and they had no reason to leave. J. C. Scott wrote a book on this called The Art of Not Being Governed.
>>2446626North Sentinelese are foragers, which mean they spend their day doing mostly nothing until they want something to eat or have some task to do. The islands have enough food and water to sustain them. They probably fish, hunt, forage, which means they are active. Their dietary needs probably aren’t lacking, there’s plenty of fish, nuts, fruit, meat, and vegetables. They are probably healthier than the average person ITT and have more free time than all of us.
>>2499718Even better
They are AEPC
>>24429401. Promise them autonomy
2. Recruit a few eager sentiboys
3. Flood with red propaganda
4. Put them at the lead of a red division
5. Invade the autonomous sentinelese zone, decapitate the leadership
6. New leadership requests to be incorporated in the ussr as a full soviet republic
7. Lenin plays nice and generous and say ‘oh no comrades, you must oreserve your independence wink wink’, and they establish the Sentinelese Democratic Republic with a one party Marxist zleninist govt, all educated in Moscow and staff all industries with soviet advisors
>>2500655no nations!
stop the deportations!
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