While a majority of the world has the privilege – or curse – of being aware that there exist other groups of people on the planet, some tribes have been “left behind” by the Europeans’ colonialism. This colonialism, and the geographical discoveries that gave it room to happen, famously lead to the many diverse advancements that result in the current info-dump of a world we live in. You would need maybe years of wondering to come up with a single question that has no answer on the internet – that is unless you’re looking up that one specific issue I had starting a new project last week. Not to mention the amount of knowledge we take for granted, like how to use Instagram, which would probably be enough to kill the average person just 200 years ago. The idea that there are tribes who live completely detached from all these things most modern man knows, like where France is on a map, what Sour Patch Kids taste like, or that Jesus Christ is Lord. It must be horrible for them, right? Someone should definitely go contact the uncontacted tribes to tell them. Right?
In 2018, an evangelical Christian missionary traveled to North Sentinel Island, 62 years after it had been banned to do so. His mission was to spread the gospel to the uncontacted hunter gatherer people that inhabited the island, trying to convert them to Christianity by talking to them in Xhosa (a Niger-Congo language spoken in Southern Africa, I don’t think you need to know much about linguistics to realize how funny this is), which the island people would respond with hysterical laughter. The missionary was murdered by the islanders after he decided to come back again, despite getting his Bible shot with a metal arrow in his prior visit.
Most people tend to think that it’s banned to contact these people because they might harm the travelers, or that it’s something about respect (though it is, to a degree), or some think that it’s because the government is hiding the Jewish space lasers on uncontacted indigenous land. The real reason is to stop any of our modern-wordly germs from infecting the tribes who have never been exposed to our pathogens, at least not in any capacity to develop immunity towards them.
Going back to evangelical Christianity, an organization called New Tribes Mission (or Ethnos360) made it their mission to spread Christianity, and disease, to uncontacted peoples. After their visits to the Nukak tribe of Colombia in the 1980s, outbreaks of malaria, measles, and other illnesses have occurred, setting off a major decline in population. They’re also responsible for many deaths in the Ayoero-Totobiegosode tribe located in Paraguay. These missionaries most likely didn’t intend to wipe out all those people, but they still died, intentionally or not.
Attempting to establish contact with peoples intentionally isolated is almost always a bad idea. Be it their own repulsion of outsiders or the diseases we are immune to finding their way over to infect and kill hundreds of people. And all in the name of what? A book? And it’s our duty to show these people the gifts of modern life like doomscrolling and McDonalds? Ignorance is blessing, and while that’s not the main reason we should stop ourselves from “civilizing” these tribes, it’s still nice to keep in mind how absurd all this sounds.
The lesson we take from this is that isolationism can be good sometimes actually.