hello step back friends and allies
welcome to another quick step again
delayed because I am still working out
the unending chaos that is my life these
days so I was actually a little bit at a
loss about to talk about I feel like the
news has been dominated by all the
discussion about Michael Cohen and the
Trump Russia stuff and all the
investigations that are going down there
but despite all that's happened I still
feel like the other shoe is yet to drop
on that and I don't really want to talk
about it unless I have like a more
complete story because it's a very big
and very Byzantine subject that is going
to require a little bit extra research
than the average quickstep video so I
pulled some of my friends my greater
friends about what I should talk about
and I got a good recommendation from
American Johnson who runs the channel
non-compete someone you should subscribe
to but yeah he's just I talked about
what happened with a missionary named
John Allen Chow who went to North
Sentinel island and was killed by its
indigenous inhabitants not only that but
India who has authority over the island
is not going to press charges and they
gave up on the process of even trying to
recover his body now the only things
that Americans said he could find online
were basically like atheist skeptics who
were mocking this poor guy for dying and
people talking about how evil and savage
the people on the island are I think
this is one of those things that doesn't
really have a good or bad take it's just
I mean that needs to be unpacked and
thought about mistakes were made the
mistakes were made by John Allen chow
but no one deserves to die for these
things but hey let's let's let's break
it up so the Sentinelese people who live
on North Sentinel island are a fairly
isolated tribe of indigenous people they
live completely isolated existences in a
area that is rather small and probably
only have a population of about fifty to
a hundred people some estimates go
between 15 and 500 but most say between
50 and 100 maybe 200 at the most it's
hard to do censuses on these people
they basically attack anybody who comes
to the island you've probably heard
about these people in like a top 10
facts thing but because there's a little
bit of an interesting story with the
whole attacking people thing but
honestly that kind of stigmatizes them
in a way that I don't think is fair what
is interesting is they attack everybody
who comes the island including like
helicopters like they will actually like
shoot those arrows and helicopters
they've also been there for a fairly
long time the first historical recording
that came up about them is in 1771 where
the British family Island or at least
saw that there was life and activity on
the North Sentinel island the next time
that they were seen was in 1867 where a
British merchant ship by the name of
Nineveh landed on the shores of North
Sentinel island and were promptly
attacked by indigenous people a few
people survive this encounter and the
crew were able to fend off the
Sentinelese people until it could be
rescued a little bit later the next
instance of meeting with these people
came from a British colonial officer who
visited the island made some
observations so that they were simple
hunter-gatherers who mostly ate fish in
1897 a British penal colony prisoner
tried to escape to North Sentinel island
and a few days later he was found killed
looked like his body had been riddled
with arrows and his throat was slashed
it was in the late 19th century when
they really established that yeah these
are a group of people who are extremely
hostile and basically attack anybody who
visits their Island something that has
stayed true all the way to today now
after India got independence the North
Sentinel island became part of the
Indian administration and starting in
1967 going to 1991 a anthropologist by
the name of dr. Pandit tried to study
the North Sentinelese people and get an
idea of what their culture was like
starting with just sort of observing off
of his ship using binoculars the
anthropologists eye not to interfere
they left a few gifts and then made
their way back Indian government also
started to take this very seriously
because they knew that if they did no
action to protect the Sentinelese people
that in the Indian Ocean where there
a lot of piracy and unscrupulous people
at sea that they would probably end up
being wiped out or they would end up
being exploited horribly by literal
slave trade and things like that so the
Indian government has put an intense
protection notice on the island is
actually now illegal to travel there and
they actually have a naval appointment
that fires on people who try to get too
close it also doesn't help that the
language of the sense of these people is
unintelligible with any other language
so without study we wouldn't be able to
speak with them so basically
communication is impossible and then
1974 National Geographic made a
documentary called man in search of man
and went to the island to see what kind
of information it could get and they
actually went with dr. Penn Dietz so
they had at least some Authority with
them when the ship got through the
Barrier Reef that protects the island
very soon after the Sentinelese started
his shooting arrows at them they had to
a retreat and find another more safe
Beach which they left a few gift
including a pig some aluminum toy car
some coconuts things like that the
response from the Sentinelese was rather
predictable they shot arrows they
actually hit the director of the
documentary with an arrow and then they
killed the pig and just buried it on the
beach however there was one instance of
peaceful contact it happened in 1991 and
I'm gonna have to read off the screen to
get his name because it's a very
complicated name but he's an
anthropologist by the name of Matt Amala
Chattopadhyay an Indian anthropologist
basically the plan was to offer them
gifts of coconuts they came without
weapons and took the coconuts
you know later encounter they had arrows
pointed at them but a woman showed up
and actually pushed the arrow down and
stopped them from being attacked but one
thing that came out of this was that
they showed they had a very good
knowledge of iron whenever they saw
metal they seemed to think it was an
extremely important thing and they were
always trying to take it and any time a
ship runs aground on the Barrier Reef
even if a crew does survive they'll come
back later and find out that the
Sentinelese have stripped a lot of the
ship for its
I earn usually probably four arrow tips
and other pieces of metalwork anyways
this anthropological program lasted for
a few years they even tried to do a
program where they would plant coconut
trees on the island but by night 94 it
was abandoned technically India had a
policy that you're not supposed to
directly contact these people and they
decided to start enforcing it mostly for
very logical reasons if a Sentinelese
people considered outsiders safe that
actually could be very dangerous for
them oh no if you studied history much
but contact between less technologically
advanced civilizations and more
technologically advanced civilizations
tends not to end well for the one on the
lower end also after Penn Dietz stopped
going to the island the Sentinelese
really broke down in their relationships
and they really started to become more
hostile towards researchers going to the
island it was gonna be a risk for the
people going to the island the other
major story that happened is in 2004
there was a major earthquake in the
Indian Ocean that caused a huge tsunami
the Indian government did go to nor sent
some island to see if everything was
okay there it looks like that they had
survived they had gone through some
pretty tough stuff but one of the things
that happen is that the earthquake
caused a good part of that reef to come
out of the ocean and add more land to
the island which sounds nice but that
reef was very important for their
fishing it does seem like they've
adapted now they actually travel several
kilometers to the north in order to go
fishing but yeah life is a lot harder
after the 2004 earthquake but yes since
1994 there's really been very little
contact and intentionally so anytime
that it has happened has been illegal in
2006 a pair of illegal fishermen were
fishing off the island they decided to
sleep on their ships and the anchor that
they put down didn't work so their ship
drifted towards the island and they were
both killed and when the Indian
government went to try and get the
bodies of those fishermen back they
basically found them impaled on bamboo
sticks and decided to just not try it
about three days later they looked at it
with a helicopter they found the bodies
and it buried
and that was when the helicopter got
shot at by arrows so yeah I guess was
too risky to risk other people's lives
to go and retrieve the bodies these two
fishermen so they didn't bother so all
of that is preamble to get to John Allen
chow
he was a 26 year old American missionary
I believe from Missouri who was part of
a group of missionaries that go to the
more dangerous parts of the world for
missionary work there are several
countries where missionary work is
illegal because you know coming in and
trying to spread your religion and
destroy the indigenous culture is not
considered kind especially because in a
lot of worlds there are still isolated
groups like the Sentinelese that could
be very heavily affected by Christian
missionaries he traveled to India on a
tourist visa and paid some fishermen to
get to the island illegally according to
his diary his plan was that he was going
to live amongst the Sentinelese and try
to spread the word of Jesus to them
which means that him going there was a
crime he was repeatedly warned by the
fishermen not to go to the island he
went anyway
started to sing Christian hymns and
Christian songs and tried to read Bible
verses to them because you know how well
that would work including the extremely
sensitive thing of trying to speak to
them in the show-cell language which is
a language indigenous to southern Africa
but finally on the 17th of November this
year he went to the island and
instructed the fishermen to leave
without him they did the fishermen later
came back and saw the Sentinelese people
dragging a dead chose buddy across the
beach and then they came back a bit
dator they saw that his body was on the
sand the heavy work of this story has
been done by The Washington Post because
they got a hold of his his journal but
basically he felt like he was charged
with a divine mission that this was one
of the last holdouts of Satan on earth
and that he needed to go and save them I
think this might be one of the things
that people don't appreciate about
evangelical Christians even I don't
appreciate about evangelical Christians
is that they are true believers they do
really think that
by doing this they are literally saving
people what they don't understand is
that Christianity is specifically
imperialist and it's outside we'll talk
about this in a second but just that
they're doing harm and they are making
themselves more unwelcome by this kind
of work especially because of things
like in this case where you do not
consider that this tribe might have
disease immunity or other things that
might come with prolonged interaction
with people from the outside and yeah
now that he's dead the Indian
government's not going to charge anybody
they're not going to investigate it and
they gave up on November 28th trying to
get his body back so this brings up a
whole lot of really interesting things
to chew on
first of all missionary work is
problematic in many ways I'm sure that
that I'm preaching to the choir on this
one but why
well missionary work besides the fact
that it is very culturally destructive
trying to come to a region and talk to a
group people who have their own culture
and their own religion and trying to
force them to become Christian through
you know love-bombing them into
submission it is a sign of imperialism
trust me missionary work and
colonization went hand in hand
throughout a lot of European history it
shows that like when I talked about in
my video about the concept that like non
Europeans could have visited the
Americas and colonized I think there's
something missing in that a lot of
people will speculate with alternate
histories about like the Chinese
settling the west coast of the United
States but honestly Christianity has a
fairly unique outlook when it comes to
religion and that is their religion says
that they must make converts of all
people it is the fundamental drive of
the religion which has created a culture
that allows for expansion imperialism
and colonization I'm not saying that's
what all Christians believe but what I'm
saying is that being ingrained in the
core of Christianity creates a culture
especially when you go into the past and
you
to the early modern period and people
did not have the same understanding of
Christianity that they do today
I actually think luckily a lot of
Christians are not evangelicals and they
don't see this part of their religion as
important as they used to which has good
connotations it allows Christianity to
modernize and be okay with religious
pluralism but yet these missionaries
still work they go to countries that are
not Christian they go to countries that
are Christian but are the wrong type of
Christian I found out that a lot of
missionaries go to Catholic countries
because Catholics I guess are the wrong
type of Christian and of course
legendarily Mormons go anywhere because
outside of like Utah there aren't a ton
of Mormons name out there corner of the
world so they've got a lot of ground to
cover and it also talks about the
precarious position of uncontacted
tribes now okay they have been contacted
but because there's no actual language
that's been covered they are very
technically uncontacted they've no-one's
ever had a conversation with the
Sentinelese people and it's a
fascinating thing to unpack and think
about in large parts of South America
especially in Brazil and also in sort of
the Oceania Islands sort of north of
Australia but south of Asia have a lot
of these groups and the policies that we
have towards them and how we treat them
has a lot of ethical discussions about
them do you deny these people modern
medicine do you let them live in a
hunter-gatherer society that where life
is brutish and short because we know
that contact itself has a lot of
not-so-good side-effects and I think
that one of the things that we really
need to unpack there is how do you do
that properly or do you do it at all is
there ever going to be a time where it's
a good time to contact an uncontacted
tribe feel like this will be good fodder
for a comment war so please give me your
opinion about if we should do anything
at all or what measures you should take
to protect them a lot of the people who
live on these islands in the Indian
Ocean are also going to be negatively
affected by climate change the rising
oceans are going to make some of their
islands much smaller or even disappear
and what
we do in that case and I think it has
interesting implications for more
futuristic e stuff like is this our
solution to the Fermi paradox is the
reason why we haven't met aliens yet
because they have a policy very similar
to the one that the Indians keep it very
well could be an answer I don't think
it's the answer I believe but if we went
to an alien planet and we found an
intelligent species but was much less
technologically sophisticated than us
what would we do and how would we do it
and even if we did put laws and
protections in place how many people
would intervene anyway honestly I find
this whole situation hard to discuss a
young man a 26 year old man is dead in
the prime of his life and he died doing
something that he believed with all of
his heart was the right thing to save
unfortunate people he was wrong he was
brainwashed but he was a true believer
and the Internet seems to be really on
board with mocking this guy or making
jokes about it but honestly it's just
sad I think that interfering with the
Sentinelese people poses a lot of risks
to them and I can't condone what
happened this is why I said there's no
like right or wrong take here it's a
extremely ambiguous but very sad set of
interactions I guess the closest people
you could blame are the church that
adopted him but in that case that shows
about how dangerous evangelical
Christianity can be and I'm starting to
think that a lot of people in the world
are pretty aware of that unless they
wish I had a better answer
sorry American Johnson