The recent death of an American missionary on North Sentinel Island has put the remote island in the Bay of Bengal, officially off-limits to most outsiders for decades, back in the news and raised questions about the future of the Sentinelese, the island’s hunter-gatherer residents who have resisted outside contact for most of their known history.

In the later 20^th century, the Indian government, which administers the Andaman and Nicobar islands archipelago to which North Sentinel belongs, attempted to make contact with the Sentinelese—attempts that usually ended with a volley of projectiles fired by the island’s residents from the shoreline. (In one event in the 1970s, the director of a National Geographic documentary about the Andamans was wounded by