John Allen Chau

John Allen Chau
Born	(1991-12-18)December 18, 1991[1] Scottsboro, Alabama, U.S.
Died	November 17, 2018(2018-11-17) (aged 26) North Sentinel Island, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India
Education	Oral Roberts University[2]
Occupation	Christian missionary

John Allen Chau (December 18, 1991 – November 17, 2018) was an American Christian missionary who was killed by the Sentinelese, a self-isolated uncontacted people, after illegally travelling to North Sentinel Island in an attempt to preach Christianity to them.^[3]

Early life[]

Chau was born on December 18, 1991, in the U.S. state of Alabama, the third and youngest child of Lynda Adams-Chau, an organizer for Chi Alpha, and Patrick Chau, a Chinese-American psychiatrist who left China during the Cultural Revolution.^[4]

Throughout his childhood, he loved camping, hiking and travelling, and excelled at various club, charity, and other extracurricular activities. He admired numerous explorers and missionaries including David Livingstone and Bruce Olson. He later attended Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma. Prior to his last and fatal journey to North Sentinel Island, Chau participated in missionary trips to Mexico, Iraqi Kurdistan, and South Africa. He first traveled to the Andaman Islands in 2015 and 2016 as part of his missionary trips, but did not visit North Sentinel Island.^[5]

Contact with Sentinelese and death[]

In 2017, during the year when Chau participated in boot camp missionary training by the Kansas City-based evangelical organization All Nations,^[6] Chau reportedly expressed his interest in preaching to the Sentinelese. Chau then traveled to and established his residence at Port Blair in October 2018, where he prepared an initial contact kit including picture cards for communication, gifts for Sentinelese people, medical equipment, and other necessities.^[5]

In November, Chau embarked on an expedition to North Sentinel Island, which he considered to be "Satan's last stronghold on Earth",^[7] with the aim of contacting and living among the Sentinelese.^[8][6] He expressed a strong desire to preach Christianity to the tribe.^[9] In preparation for the trip, Chau was vaccinated and quarantined,^[10] and also undertook medical and linguistic training.^[9] However, he did not seek permission from the Indian authorities before embarking, making his trip illegal under Indian law,^[11] as foreign citizens must obtain a permit to visit the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, with nobody being allowed on North Sentinel.^[12] Instead, Chau paid two fishermen 25,000 Indian rupees to take him close to the island.^[13] The fishermen were later arrested.^[14]

Chau paddled a kayak from the boat to the island and attempted to communicate with Sentinelese upon their first contact, but left the gifts and retreated when the villagers began stringing their bows. He later paddled back to the island and walked up to the beach this time while attempting to communicate with the natives. Chau abandoned his kayak and swam back to the boat in panic when one of the villagers shot an arrow at him and struck the Bible he was holding. On November 16, the date when Chau was last seen alive, he asked the fishermen to drop him off alone on the island after thinking that the Sentinelese might feel more comfortable if they did not see the foreign fishing boat nearby. Prior to being left on the island alone, Chau admitted in his diary that he was scared, but it was "worth it to declare Jesus to these people."^[5] Chau was subsequently killed by the Sentinelese. The fishermen who had ferried him later observed Sentinelese tribesmen dragging a body along the beach and burying it.^[15]

Aftermath[]

Despite efforts by Indian authorities, which involved a tense encounter with the tribe, Chau's body was not recovered.^[6] Indian officials made several attempts to recover Chau's body but eventually abandoned those efforts. An anthropologist involved in the case told The Guardian that the risk of a dangerous clash between investigators and the islanders was too great to justify any further attempts.^[16] A murder case was opened following his death.^[17]

Chau was criticized by Survival International among others for visiting the island despite the possibility of introducing pathogens to the native Sentinelese, which could have been deadly since it was likely that the natives had not been exposed previously to diseases from outside the island.^{[18][4][19][20]} All Nations, the evangelical organization that trained Chau, was criticized on social media for describing Chau as a martyr while expressing condolences for Chau's death. Chau's father also blamed his son's death on the missionary community for inculcating an extreme Christian vision within Chau.^[5] According to a report by The New York Times, the missionary training by All Nations included navigating a mock native village populated by missionary staff members who pretended to be hostile natives, wielding fake spears.^[21]

In response to Chau's death, M. Sasikumar of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, questioned the legal charge of murder and what he perceived as a romanticized version of the incident in the media. He wrote that the incident should instead serve as a warning that the "eyes-only" policy with regard to the Sentinelese needs to be more strictly enforced, and include the local fishermen in order to prevent a repetition.^[22]

Michael Schönhuth, Professor for Cultural Anthropology at the University of Trier, Germany, found the media response to Chau's killing of cultural interest. He wrote that the narratives that emerged were part of a larger discussion regarding the proper relationship between the modern world and the remaining isolated indigenous peoples. Schönhuth wrote that the online presence of the Evangelical missionary community which had grown over the preceding twenty years, and in which Chau was an active participant, presented a narrative in which they were bringing civilization to a primitive people, and that the likelihood of missionaries being killed was not a deterrent, but an affirmation of the need for the "uncontacted people" to be rescued from a savage existence. Schönhuth faulted the media for playing into this narrative, ignoring the history of exploitation of the people in the region, which presented an alternative narrative in which the killing of Chau was self-defense. Schönhuth suggested that the media hype must be reinterpreted to allow for such alternatives to be understood.^[23]

References[]