Yeah so the North Sentinelese are a good case because they’re prevented as somehow totally isolated, but Afaik there are extent government records from the mainland detailing interactions with them as far back as several hundred years, and presumably folks have been interacting with them prior to that. They obviously don’t have diplomatic relations with the rest of the world, so I have no idea how they remember history, but until the British came and fucked everything up on the nearest island their closest neighbors were only ten miles away. Maybe they never talked to them, but I think that’s pretty unlikely.

And, just reading the wiki page, it sounds like there have actually been plenty of, if not friendly, at least cordial contacts with folks on North Sentinel over the centuries. Like they’ve definitely known we’re all out here for a long, long time. They’ve just got, you know, really strict immigration policies. I think there was one meeting where they were willing to hang out with some anthropologists, provided the anthropologists stayed in the ocean and didn’t attempt to come ashore.

Like, they’re people, they’re protecting their land, they’re asserting agency over their territory. We can’t talk to them because no one from outside their community speaks their language, but they’ve got language just like the rest of us, they’re apparently gathering iron and steel from shipwrecks to make tools, they’re living their lives. Who knows, maybe some day they’ll loosen up their isolationist policy and start communicating more. Cultures change all the time, often very rapidly. There’s a pretty good chance their current isolationist policies are due to shit that went down during English colonialism in India.

Another thing to think about; During the high days of colonialism and Imperialism 1.0 Europeans were “making contact” all the time. But the thing is? Pretty much everyone they “made contact” with already had some European manufactured goods - knives, tools, fabric, whatever, because those people were trading with their neighbors, who were trading with their neighbors, who were trading with their neighbors, and somewhere along that line someone was trading for goods with europeans. People really like iron and steel tools. They’re mostly a lot better than stone or wood tools, so when someone got access to european tools (or fabric, also highly desirable) that stuff could cross hundreds or thousands of kilometers across local trade networks long, long before white people showed up. There were even a couple of cases where Europeans “made contact” and were greated in French or English or whatever because someone from the “isolated tribe” had visited Europe or at least a European city and learned the language.

A lot of these notions about the world, they come from the way Europeans thought about things. Europeans told themselves that they were the height of civilization and that justified them conquering everyone else. But for that to be true, they had to have the best governments and the best technologies and the best culture. So they told themselves that the most important things were working iron, wearing shoes, things like that, so they could convince themselves that folks who didn’t have ironworking technology or who didn’t wear shoes were “primitive”, less than, inferior.

And it was and remains mostly bullshit. Like, the Inca? They were building bridges and stuff out of rope, out of fiber, that Europeans just flat out could not figure out. Bridges made from plant fiber stretching between mountaintops across enormous valleys that you could ride horses across. Europe just did not have that level of prowess with fiber and rope. Folks in central America, Aztecs and Maya, folks in that region, had rubber-soled sandals and shoes when the Euros arrived. Peruvians had techniques for building earth-quake resistant stone buildings that turned out to be cannon-resistant, too. They used mortarless stone construction, but each stone had slots and protrusions that fitted in with other stones. Enormously labor intensive, but the result was a structure that could flex, it wasn’t rigid, so when there was an earthquake it would flex instead of collapsing.

There’s stuff like this all over, folks adapted to their region and developed technologies for taking advantage of the resources they had at hand. Ironworking didn’t make it to Australia before Euros did, and wasn’t independently invented in the Americas, and Euros fixated on that as proof that the people there were less than them.

You can even see it in books today. “Guns Germs and Steel?” Sure, except guns weren’t really consistently better than bows and spears and hand weapons until maybe the late 1700s. Especially in low-intensity warfare and guerilla warfare, which was what a lot of the wars in North America were. The famous conquistadors didn’t really win just by having some guns and breastplates, they were part of a coalition army of almost 200,000 soldiers that marched against the Aztec empire. An absolutely unbelievable amount of troops, the kind of military mobilization you could expect from China or the Steppe, but never from Europe. Like folks should be talking about the Tlaxcaltec war against the Aztecs instead of the Spanish conquest. The Spanish came out on top in the end, but they also showed up at a nearly perfect time and wouldn’t have been able to pull this shit off a hundred years in either direction.

Idk, there’s just tons and tons and tons of this to go through, to examine, to question. If you want a really good example happening right now, that really smashes the idea of “primitive” people, look up how folks in Brazil who live in the amazon are organizing politically to fight against illegal resource extraction companies and cattle ranches that are coming in, polluting local resources, clear cutting the forest. You see these guys wearing all their formal clothes and ornaments, “primitive savages”, but these guys are 21st century indigenous political leaders operating in the Brazillian court system and government and working in coalition with indigenous rights groups all over the world. Westerners have been taught to see them as primitive because their idea of formal attire for important meetings isn’t a suit and tie, because they live in a different kind of house and wear different clothes, but they’re doing political organizing and fighting political battles, winning victories, getting shit done because they’re modern people living in the modern world who know their shit, know how to fight, and are fighting even though the odds are mostly stacked against them.

Once you start breaking all these preconceptions, these lies that Europeans have built, it really rocks the way you view the world. Instead of seeing primitive people you start seeing sophisticated, highly capable people adapting expertly to the places where they live, building their own political and economic systems, doing just fine without a care in the world for what Europeans think of them. There are a lot of societies out there that have been engaged in revolutionary action and resistance for centuries, some with continuity from the moment the Euros invaded right to the present day, fighting like hell the whole time. It makes the world a lot bigger, a lot more colorful, a lot more strange. Keep working, comrade. We all started out as people who had a whole lot to learn.