Opinion Indigenous people have the right to reject outside contact. We must respect their choice
Indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation have the right to live undisturbed, govern their ancestral lands, refuse contact, and exercise Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC)
Nearly 95 per cent dwell in the Amazon: 124 in Brazil and 64 spread across Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Four survive in Indonesia, and two each in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and West Papua. Also by Nancy
January 1778, Kaua‘i, Hawaiian Islands. When Captain James Cook’s ships appeared on the horizon, the Hawaiians were struck with awe and dread. They saw things beyond imagination. A local priest declared the ships heiaus — floating temples of the gods. The strangers aboard seemed equally otherworldly. Hawaiians saw their tricorne hats as deformed skulls, their uniforms as sagging skin, and their pockets as tiny doors that opened into their bodies, holding treasures. It remains one of the few recorded accounts of how an “uncontacted” Indigenous people perceived their first contact with Europeans.
Long before Cook “discovered” the Hawaiian Islands, the Andaman Islands had already become matters of legend and fear. As early as the second century CE, travellers spun lurid tales about its inhabitants — Marco Polo called them “big mastiff dogs,” Friar Odoric “dog-faced cannibals,” and Sir John Mandeville “one-eyed giants.” When British surveyor John Ritchie finally mapped the archipelago in 1771, myth gave way to a new violence called “civilisation.”
An enduring genocide
The first encounters between Europeans and the “uncontacted” Indigenous societies of the Pacific and Indian Oceans unleashed devastation — colonisation, disease, conversion, and annihilation. During Europe’s so-called “Age of Exploration,” the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci sparked a similar apocalypse on a vast scale. Conquest masqueraded as “discovery,” and tens of millions of Indigenous people — including the mighty Aztec and Inca civilisations — were erased.
Yet this genocide is not a closed chapter of history. It endures, quietly, in our times. A new report by Survival International, Uncontacted Indigenous Peoples: At the Edge of Survival reveals that at least 196 “uncontacted” Indigenous groups still exist — and half could vanish within a decade, perhaps before the world even learns their names.
These “uncontacted” peoples — also called “free,” “invisible,” or “hidden” communities — live in voluntary isolation on ancestral lands they have inhabited for millennia, long before modern states were born. Nearly 95 per cent dwell in the Amazon: 124 in Brazil and 64 spread across Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Four survive in Indonesia, and two each in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and West Papua.
They are not unaware of the world beyond their forests; they have simply chosen to reject it. Their refusal is born of memory — of encounters that brought only disease, slavery, and death. With no immunity to outside diseases, even a single contact can wipe out an entire people. In the Brazilian Amazon, over 80 per cent of newly contacted indigenes die from disease. “My children died, my mother died. My husband died. My brothers, my sisters, my aunts and uncles,” recalled one Matis woman. “I saw the bones sticking out of their rotting corpses inside the longhouse. We were too weak to bury them. I was left alone with my two baby brothers. All my family died.”
The new frontiers of violence
Almost all Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation now face grave threats to their lands and resources from governments, corporations, or criminal networks. Under the banners of “progress,” “national interest,” or “development,” forests are felled, rivers poisoned, peoples displaced, and worlds erased. In India, a ₹92,000-crore megaproject on Great Nicobar threatens the Shompen with the same fate.
Missionary activity compounds this violence. According to Survival’s report, “at least one in six uncontacted peoples today are threatened by missionaries making active attempts to contact and convert uncontacted peoples to Christianity, and in some places to Islam.” Organisations such as the Joshua Project and All Nations International — which inspired John Allen Chau’s fatal 2018 trespassing into North Sentinel Island — operate on deeply racist and colonial logics of salvation, seeking to remake Indigenous worlds in their own image. As All Nations’ leader, Mary Ho declared, “One day, every tongue, every tribe, every nation will be worshipping God around his throne.”
Beyond the evangelists, a new breed of digital-age adventurers now chases contact for fame, fueled by sensationalised portrayals of Indigenous communities in voluntary isolation. Literary works like The Last Island of the Savages (2000), The Palm at the End of the Mind (2024), and Island (2024) by American authors Adam Goodheart, Rachel Kushner, and Sujit Saraf have romanticised this fascination with the Sentinelese. Such narratives — acts of epistemic violence — feed reckless pursuits like that of Mykhailo Polyakov, the American YouTuber who, in March, became the fourth US citizen to illegally seek contact with the Sentinelese.
The right to remain unseen
The history of contact tells a chilling story — encounter, exploitation, and eventual extermination. Wamaxuá Awá, one of the Awá people first contacted in Brazil in 2009, voiced this heartbreak: “When I lived in the forest, I had a good life… Now if I meet one of the uncontacted Awá in the forest, I’ll say, ‘Don’t leave! Stay in the forest. …There’s nothing in the outside for you.’”
Indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation have the right to live undisturbed, govern their ancestral lands, refuse contact, and exercise Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC). These protections are enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), ILO Convention No. 169 (1989), and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), among others.
Yet these commitments ring hollow without action. India’s “eyes-on, hands-off” policy toward the Sentinelese stands as a rare act of restraint — respecting their right to reject contact and preserve sovereignty over their world. But the simultaneous push for a megaproject on Great Nicobar, imposed upon the Shompen, betrays this very principle — threatening not only their lives but the fragile lifeworlds that have endured for millennia, untouched by the greed that now seeks to consume them.
If governments do not move beyond rhetoric, if laws remain mere ink on paper, the world will soon witness the disappearance of its last free peoples — those who asked only to be left alone. Their vanishing will not just erase cultures; it will extinguish the last living memory of another way of being — a world not built on surveillance, capitalism, greed, and mindless consumption, but on autonomy, balance, self-sufficiency, and deep belonging. To lose them is to forget what freedom itself once meant.
Saini teaches at the Centre for Rural Development and Technology, IIT Delhi. He works with remote Indigenous communities. Nancy is currently a research associate at People’s Lab, IIT Delhi
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