This is a perfect example of "shit white people do"... dude paddled up with a bible & cross lol
Lol, you managed to be a bigot and make a racist statement. I’m glad we get to read everyone’s real thoughts on immigration.
In what way do you think responses to this story reflect posters’ opinions on immigration, given that it is about a completely different issue?
It’s not different in the least. Someone was attempting to go to a land. They weren’t welcome. The people there believed that the alien may have come to take over their way of life or to harm them or put stress on their people. They made sure it didn’t happen. You all (most) believe they were right in what they did.
Are you high?
No, sorry I don’t partake. Maybe I should so I can block out the hypocrisy I see from all of us. I have to pass on it though.
There is no hypocrisy on display here in this thread. Your analogy was poorly constructed.
This idiot wasn’t even looking to immigrate so the scenarios can’t even be compared for one. And if he was... well then the two situations still aren’t comparable. At all.
Oh, they are. Just like saying the Indians should have kept the Europeans out of North America.
No.
You're being silly now.
For the record (and without a doubt), if the Indians had known what was ahead for them... they should have met the European invasion with as much force as they could muster. Saying this is not suggesting I am apologizing for my existence- I'm not.
Is that why we’re sending troops to the border? For what might be????
I am assuming so. You’re worried that a caravan of broken Honduran people fleeing the violence of their home country is the first step in the decimation of the US people.
No?
You all seem to be the ones against immigration. I was just pointing out hypocrisy.
No you are not pointing out hypocrisy -- you show your own problems with connecting dots and thinking out analogys.
No, I can connect the dots that some people refuse to acknowledge. Read what’s written.
the caravan is not an invasion. most here are not against legal immigration or claiming asylum the christian was SEEN by the inhabitants of the island as an invasion, and was dealt with accordingly. and whether you wish to acknowledge it or not, his intent is irrelevant to whether he was actually an invader or not. he most likely did not intend to infect them with bacteria we are immune to. but that's what he very likely could have done. they didn't know he was christian. they don't fucking know what a christian even is. I would have the same non-feelings towards the guy had he been an ahtiest going there to peddle his Scientific ways.
An invasion. Armed with a Bible.
bible blocks an arrow from killing him. swins back to the boat that brought him.
the next day he WENT BACK. Desrved to die? no. Earned his death? yes.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
This is a perfect example of "shit white people do"... dude paddled up with a bible & cross lol
Lol, you managed to be a bigot and make a racist statement. I’m glad we get to read everyone’s real thoughts on immigration.
In what way do you think responses to this story reflect posters’ opinions on immigration, given that it is about a completely different issue?
It’s not different in the least. Someone was attempting to go to a land. They weren’t welcome. The people there believed that the alien may have come to take over their way of life or to harm them or put stress on their people. They made sure it didn’t happen. You all (most) believe they were right in what they did.
Are you high?
No, sorry I don’t partake. Maybe I should so I can block out the hypocrisy I see from all of us. I have to pass on it though.
There is no hypocrisy on display here in this thread. Your analogy was poorly constructed.
This idiot wasn’t even looking to immigrate so the scenarios can’t even be compared for one. And if he was... well then the two situations still aren’t comparable. At all.
Oh, they are. Just like saying the Indians should have kept the Europeans out of North America.
No.
You're being silly now.
For the record (and without a doubt), if the Indians had known what was ahead for them... they should have met the European invasion with as much force as they could muster. Saying this is not suggesting I am apologizing for my existence- I'm not.
Is that why we’re sending troops to the border? For what might be????
I am assuming so. You’re worried that a caravan of broken Honduran people fleeing the violence of their home country is the first step in the decimation of the US people.
No?
You all seem to be the ones against immigration. I was just pointing out hypocrisy.
No you are not pointing out hypocrisy -- you show your own problems with connecting dots and thinking out analogys.
No, I can connect the dots that some people refuse to acknowledge. Read what’s written.
the caravan is not an invasion. most here are not against legal immigration or claiming asylum the christian was SEEN by the inhabitants of the island as an invasion, and was dealt with accordingly. and whether you wish to acknowledge it or not, his intent is irrelevant to whether he was actually an invader or not. he most likely did not intend to infect them with bacteria we are immune to. but that's what he very likely could have done. they didn't know he was christian. they don't fucking know what a christian even is. I would have the same non-feelings towards the guy had he been an ahtiest going there to peddle his Scientific ways.
An invasion. Armed with a Bible.
History tells us that’s one of the worst invasions a people can meet.
If this guy didn't deserve to die then NOBODY does.
So someone trying to spread his religion deserves to die more than the dozens of people on death row for multiple intentional homicides?
Nope, lol. SMH. I find it ridiculous that everyone's mind went to the DP when I said that. Silliness.
Also, did everyone suddenly lose their full grasp of the English language, when they thought my sentence means that this guy deserves death more than anyone else on earth? Wtf?
Well, you compared him to a rapist-burglar who gets shot in the head. I don't think its that big of a leap when you compare an unarmed missionary trying to share the Bible religion to a rapist. I'm not going to scroll up, but I'm pretty sure you said "no one deserves to die as much as him" or something very close to that. SO with that being said, comparing him to a rapist, yeah, I can see why several on here are thinking that.
Well I made that comment before I mentioned a rapist, but I do stand by the comparison in any case, and am surprised that so few think it's apt. It tells me that most aren't really thinking about the perspective of the tribes people at all.
I've said I think the missionary was wrong and the tribe should be left alone. But I consider a rapist one of the lowest people on earth. This guy was much better than that. He made a bad decision, but that decision had good intentions whether you agree with him or not. I think saying he deserved this and comparing him to anyone bad, especially a rapist, is not accurate and overreaching.
Okay then, murderer, just to avoid the subjective ideas about the seriousness of rape and the comparisons of it to the concepts driving colonization I suppose? So a MURDERER breaking into a family's home is comparable. Is that better for you? I'm not AT ALL talking about what this guy was like as a person. I'm talking only of the threat he posed to the tribe, in their minds. And I do still think that rapist is as good a comparison in that context as anything.
I'm sure some slave traders had good intentions too btw. That doesn't seem like something that would have been very relevant to the slaves though, does it?
I don't like it because of the intent. You talk about a murderer breaking into someone's home it implies he meant to hurt them. Although he very well could have carried disease and viruses to kill these people, that is definitely no this intent. So Ijust don't see the comparison between rapist or murderer.
I can't think of a single good intent a slave trader could have towards the slaves. Not ones that didn't involve freeing them. And I think intent does matter. If a man sees a homeless guy and helps him build a fire to get through a freezing night, and that fire goes out of control and burns down a house with a family in it, would you treat him the same as an arson who intentionally burns down a house with a family inside? The first guy definitely made a mistake, but I wouldn't compare him to the second. This guy made a mistake (and was very stupid) and paid a big price for it. And its a sad story. He doesn't deserve it though, not like someone going to the island to intentionally kill off these people.
his intent is irrelevant to the act of the tribespeople killing him. they don't know his intent. they don't care. if they care they may die.
I think where this spiralled out of control is where she said the vague comment"nobody does". people got confused by that (and I still don't know who the "nobody" is in this context). and she doubled down on it. and here we are.
I agree. But I think it matters in terms of if he deserved it or not, and if he should be compared to a murderer/rapist or not. I saw several say he deserved it. I just can't understand why anyone would say he deserves this. Say its his own fault, he was stupid or careless. But he didn't deserve to get killed.
I guess you're interpreting the word different than I am then... You're using some kind of emotional interpretation of it. I'm using the word more objectively. He literally deserved it. He did something illegal that is known to be likely to get him killed, and, most importantly, that threatened the lives of a bunch of other people who are well known to defend themselves in that manner, which is half the reason approaching them is illegal in the first place. Therefore, he deserved the consequences of his actions. Kind of like someone who knowingly walks into a cage occupied by a starving wild tiger deserves to get mauled and eaten by the tiger. Actions = consequence.
Or, someone throwing rocks hoping to harm or kill law enforcement with the intent to illegally cross a protected border?
If this guy didn't deserve to die then NOBODY does.
So someone trying to spread his religion deserves to die more than the dozens of people on death row for multiple intentional homicides?
Nope, lol. SMH. I find it ridiculous that everyone's mind went to the DP when I said that. Silliness.
Also, did everyone suddenly lose their full grasp of the English language, when they thought my sentence means that this guy deserves death more than anyone else on earth? Wtf?
Well, you compared him to a rapist-burglar who gets shot in the head. I don't think its that big of a leap when you compare an unarmed missionary trying to share the Bible religion to a rapist. I'm not going to scroll up, but I'm pretty sure you said "no one deserves to die as much as him" or something very close to that. SO with that being said, comparing him to a rapist, yeah, I can see why several on here are thinking that.
Well I made that comment before I mentioned a rapist, but I do stand by the comparison in any case, and am surprised that so few think it's apt. It tells me that most aren't really thinking about the perspective of the tribes people at all.
I've said I think the missionary was wrong and the tribe should be left alone. But I consider a rapist one of the lowest people on earth. This guy was much better than that. He made a bad decision, but that decision had good intentions whether you agree with him or not. I think saying he deserved this and comparing him to anyone bad, especially a rapist, is not accurate and overreaching.
Okay then, murderer, just to avoid the subjective ideas about the seriousness of rape and the comparisons of it to the concepts driving colonization I suppose? So a MURDERER breaking into a family's home is comparable. Is that better for you? I'm not AT ALL talking about what this guy was like as a person. I'm talking only of the threat he posed to the tribe, in their minds. And I do still think that rapist is as good a comparison in that context as anything.
I'm sure some slave traders had good intentions too btw. That doesn't seem like something that would have been very relevant to the slaves though, does it?
I don't like it because of the intent. You talk about a murderer breaking into someone's home it implies he meant to hurt them. Although he very well could have carried disease and viruses to kill these people, that is definitely no this intent. So Ijust don't see the comparison between rapist or murderer.
I can't think of a single good intent a slave trader could have towards the slaves. Not ones that didn't involve freeing them. And I think intent does matter. If a man sees a homeless guy and helps him build a fire to get through a freezing night, and that fire goes out of control and burns down a house with a family in it, would you treat him the same as an arson who intentionally burns down a house with a family inside? The first guy definitely made a mistake, but I wouldn't compare him to the second. This guy made a mistake (and was very stupid) and paid a big price for it. And its a sad story. He doesn't deserve it though, not like someone going to the island to intentionally kill off these people.
his intent is irrelevant to the act of the tribespeople killing him. they don't know his intent. they don't care. if they care they may die.
I think where this spiralled out of control is where she said the vague comment"nobody does". people got confused by that (and I still don't know who the "nobody" is in this context). and she doubled down on it. and here we are.
I agree. But I think it matters in terms of if he deserved it or not, and if he should be compared to a murderer/rapist or not. I saw several say he deserved it. I just can't understand why anyone would say he deserves this. Say its his own fault, he was stupid or careless. But he didn't deserve to get killed.
I guess you're interpreting the word different than I am then... You're using some kind of emotional interpretation of it. I'm using the word more objectively. He literally deserved it. He did something illegal that is known to be likely to get him killed, and, most importantly, that threatened the lives of a bunch of other people who are well known to defend themselves in that manner, which is half the reason approaching them is illegal in the first place. Therefore, he deserved the consequences of his actions. Kind of like someone who knowingly walks into a cage occupied by a starving wild tiger deserves to get mauled and eaten by the tiger. Actions = consequence.
Or, someone throwing rocks hoping to harm or kill law enforcement with the intent to illegally cross a protected border?
You are just arguing for the sake of arguing. There is no response for a productive debate.
This is a perfect example of "shit white people do"... dude paddled up with a bible & cross lol
Lol, you managed to be a bigot and make a racist statement. I’m glad we get to read everyone’s real thoughts on immigration.
In what way do you think responses to this story reflect posters’ opinions on immigration, given that it is about a completely different issue?
It’s not different in the least. Someone was attempting to go to a land. They weren’t welcome. The people there believed that the alien may have come to take over their way of life or to harm them or put stress on their people. They made sure it didn’t happen. You all (most) believe they were right in what they did.
Are you high?
No, sorry I don’t partake. Maybe I should so I can block out the hypocrisy I see from all of us. I have to pass on it though.
There is no hypocrisy on display here in this thread. Your analogy was poorly constructed.
This idiot wasn’t even looking to immigrate so the scenarios can’t even be compared for one. And if he was... well then the two situations still aren’t comparable. At all.
Oh, they are. Just like saying the Indians should have kept the Europeans out of North America.
No.
You're being silly now.
For the record (and without a doubt), if the Indians had known what was ahead for them... they should have met the European invasion with as much force as they could muster. Saying this is not suggesting I am apologizing for my existence- I'm not.
Is that why we’re sending troops to the border? For what might be????
I am assuming so. You’re worried that a caravan of broken Honduran people fleeing the violence of their home country is the first step in the decimation of the US people.
No?
You all seem to be the ones against immigration. I was just pointing out hypocrisy.
No you are not pointing out hypocrisy -- you show your own problems with connecting dots and thinking out analogys.
No, I can connect the dots that some people refuse to acknowledge. Read what’s written.
the caravan is not an invasion. most here are not against legal immigration or claiming asylum the christian was SEEN by the inhabitants of the island as an invasion, and was dealt with accordingly. and whether you wish to acknowledge it or not, his intent is irrelevant to whether he was actually an invader or not. he most likely did not intend to infect them with bacteria we are immune to. but that's what he very likely could have done. they didn't know he was christian. they don't fucking know what a christian even is. I would have the same non-feelings towards the guy had he been an ahtiest going there to peddle his Scientific ways.
An invasion. Armed with a Bible.
History tells us that’s one of the worst invasions a people can meet.
This is a perfect example of "shit white people do"... dude paddled up with a bible & cross lol
Lol, you managed to be a bigot and make a racist statement. I’m glad we get to read everyone’s real thoughts on immigration.
In what way do you think responses to this story reflect posters’ opinions on immigration, given that it is about a completely different issue?
It’s not different in the least. Someone was attempting to go to a land. They weren’t welcome. The people there believed that the alien may have come to take over their way of life or to harm them or put stress on their people. They made sure it didn’t happen. You all (most) believe they were right in what they did.
Are you high?
No, sorry I don’t partake. Maybe I should so I can block out the hypocrisy I see from all of us. I have to pass on it though.
There is no hypocrisy on display here in this thread. Your analogy was poorly constructed.
This idiot wasn’t even looking to immigrate so the scenarios can’t even be compared for one. And if he was... well then the two situations still aren’t comparable. At all.
Oh, they are. Just like saying the Indians should have kept the Europeans out of North America.
No.
You're being silly now.
For the record (and without a doubt), if the Indians had known what was ahead for them... they should have met the European invasion with as much force as they could muster. Saying this is not suggesting I am apologizing for my existence- I'm not.
Is that why we’re sending troops to the border? For what might be????
I am assuming so. You’re worried that a caravan of broken Honduran people fleeing the violence of their home country is the first step in the decimation of the US people.
No?
You all seem to be the ones against immigration. I was just pointing out hypocrisy.
No you are not pointing out hypocrisy -- you show your own problems with connecting dots and thinking out analogys.
No, I can connect the dots that some people refuse to acknowledge. Read what’s written.
the caravan is not an invasion. most here are not against legal immigration or claiming asylum the christian was SEEN by the inhabitants of the island as an invasion, and was dealt with accordingly. and whether you wish to acknowledge it or not, his intent is irrelevant to whether he was actually an invader or not. he most likely did not intend to infect them with bacteria we are immune to. but that's what he very likely could have done. they didn't know he was christian. they don't fucking know what a christian even is. I would have the same non-feelings towards the guy had he been an ahtiest going there to peddle his Scientific ways.
An invasion. Armed with a Bible.
History tells us that’s one of the worst invasions a people can meet.
Why because it invades your soul?
Do you have an inability to answer anything I post to you? I'll answer - yes you do. Why? I don't care. This thread is dead.
This is a perfect example of "shit white people do"... dude paddled up with a bible & cross lol
Lol, you managed to be a bigot and make a racist statement. I’m glad we get to read everyone’s real thoughts on immigration.
In what way do you think responses to this story reflect posters’ opinions on immigration, given that it is about a completely different issue?
It’s not different in the least. Someone was attempting to go to a land. They weren’t welcome. The people there believed that the alien may have come to take over their way of life or to harm them or put stress on their people. They made sure it didn’t happen. You all (most) believe they were right in what they did.
Are you high?
No, sorry I don’t partake. Maybe I should so I can block out the hypocrisy I see from all of us. I have to pass on it though.
There is no hypocrisy on display here in this thread. Your analogy was poorly constructed.
This idiot wasn’t even looking to immigrate so the scenarios can’t even be compared for one. And if he was... well then the two situations still aren’t comparable. At all.
Oh, they are. Just like saying the Indians should have kept the Europeans out of North America.
No.
You're being silly now.
For the record (and without a doubt), if the Indians had known what was ahead for them... they should have met the European invasion with as much force as they could muster. Saying this is not suggesting I am apologizing for my existence- I'm not.
Is that why we’re sending troops to the border? For what might be????
I am assuming so. You’re worried that a caravan of broken Honduran people fleeing the violence of their home country is the first step in the decimation of the US people.
No?
You all seem to be the ones against immigration. I was just pointing out hypocrisy.
No you are not pointing out hypocrisy -- you show your own problems with connecting dots and thinking out analogys.
No, I can connect the dots that some people refuse to acknowledge. Read what’s written.
the caravan is not an invasion. most here are not against legal immigration or claiming asylum the christian was SEEN by the inhabitants of the island as an invasion, and was dealt with accordingly. and whether you wish to acknowledge it or not, his intent is irrelevant to whether he was actually an invader or not. he most likely did not intend to infect them with bacteria we are immune to. but that's what he very likely could have done. they didn't know he was christian. they don't fucking know what a christian even is. I would have the same non-feelings towards the guy had he been an ahtiest going there to peddle his Scientific ways.
An invasion. Armed with a Bible.
History tells us that’s one of the worst invasions a people can meet.
Why because it invades your soul?
No. People get hurt.
Large scale: crusades. Small scale: Native American experiences (in particular the residential school experiences).
On Instagram, John A. Chau came off like a carefree young adventurer — climbing mountain peaks and exploring jungles. But in reality, the missionary harbored a deadly obsession with an isolated tribe in India he’d first read about as a teen.
Chau spent years planning and training to travel illegally to remote North Sentinel Island on a mission to convert its residents to Christianity, including learning emergency medicine, and studying linguistics and cultural anthropology, his missionary group said. Though he knew the islanders had long violently resisted outsiders, he conducted a covert mission to the protected island this month. Police said that shortly after he arrived at the island this month, the tribe killed him. Indian authorities say they have yet to recover the body.
The death of the 26-year-old missionary from Washington state — who broke a raft of laws and put the health of the indigenous people at risk — has sparked international outrage, a heated debate about the protection of tribal communities and at least two investigations by authorities in India. It also has prompted soul-searching in the U.S. evangelical community, which has been debating whether Chau was a martyr, a fool or was afflicted by a messiah complex.
“God, I don’t want to die,” Chau scrawled in his journal while sitting in a fishing boat off the coast of the island where the North Sentinelese people live, shortly before he was killed. “WHO WILL TAKE MY PLACE IF I DO?”
Chau, easygoing and friendly, seemed like any other backpacker when he showed up at Remco Snoeij’s dive shop in 2016 on Havelock Island — in India’s Andaman and Nicobar island chain — and said he wanted to learn to scuba dive.
Chau’s time on the island, a diver’s haven, was largely unremarkable. He stayed in a house called Scubaluv, which was filled with “chattering geckos,” swam with parrotfish and snapped pictures of blue coral for his Instagram account, where he had 17,000 followers.
Yet Snoeij recalled that Chau seemed intently interested in the North Sentinelese tribe, which lived a Stone Age existence on a nearby island, protected by a three-mile, exclusion zone imposed by the Indian government. The tribe has long resisted outside human contact; when Indian helicopters flew overhead after the 2004 tsunami, members of the tribe fired arrows and threw spears.
Snoeij told Chau that the island was off-limits, but on dive excursions, he regaled the American with local lore — about the two fishermen who traveled to the island in 2006 and were strangled by islanders, about the rumors that the Japanese military had buried gold there during World War II.
“He shared a keen interest in researching and knowing more about them,” Snoeij said. “It must have struck a chord.”
Chau later told other friends he was on a kind of reconnaissance mission; police said that on his last trip to the island, he spent time studying how to circumvent military patrols.
Chau had a “very meticulous plan to camouflage his expedition as fishing activity,” said Dependra Pathak, the director general of police for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
The son of a doctor who fled China during the Cultural Revolution, Chau had been fascinated with the outdoors since he pulled a dusty copy of “Robinson Crusoe” off his father’s bookshelf as a child, he told an online wilderness adventure journal. He later read the novel “The Sign of the Beaver,” about a boy who is left alone and guards his family’s log cabin with the help of a Native American friend.
That book “inspired my brother and I to paint our faces with wild blackberry juice and to tramp through our backyard with bows and spears we created from sticks,” Chau recalled.
In an email, Chau’s father, Patrick, declined to comment, saying the family needs peace. U.S. missionary killed by tribe on remote Indian island
Chau majored in sports medicine at Oral Roberts University, graduating in 2014, and he volunteered for soccer programs in Iraq and South Africa. He lived in a cabin for three summers in Whiskeytown National Recreation Area in California; at one point, he was hospitalized after being bitten by a rattlesnake.
A friend, John Middleton Ramsey, 22, recalls that in 2016 Chau stayed with him in Bellingham, Wash., and that the island in the Andaman Sea was much on his mind. Chau confided that he was avoiding romantic attachments because of his planned mission.
“He knew of the dangers of this place,” Ramsey recalled. “He didn’t want any hearts to get broken should something go wrong. He was very much aware of what he was doing. He also knew it wasn’t exactly legal.”
That year, Chau joined forces with All Nations, a missionary group based in Kansas City, Mo., that sends Christian missionaries to 40 countries. The group provided him training and support, according to Mary Ho, its international executive leader. She was surprised by the “soft-spoken, very gentle young man” who had a very “radical call” to find “unreached groups.”
“You could see that every decision he has made, every step he has taken since then was driven by his desire to be among the North Sentinelese people,” Ho said. He planned to live there for years and hoped to learn their language.
Ho said the group was aware that Chau had traveled to India as a tourist, without the proper missionary visa, because missionary visas “aren’t easy to come by.” Ho insisted that Chau had not violated any laws, though authorities in India said he clearly did.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, says Chau violated the country’s aboriginal and forest protection laws as well as cultural norms.
“He repeatedly trespassed on this island, and they lost their patience with him,” Chellaney said. “There is faith, and there is mental illness. . . . He didn’t understand the line between faith and doing something that’s absolutely nutty.”
Chau’s diary, which his family provided to The Washington Post, unfolds like the adventure novels he once read. He arrived in the Andamans on Oct. 16 and paid fishermen to take him by boat at night to the island on Nov. 14, evading the lights of patrols on the way. When the sun broke, Chau drew near the tribe. The women began “looing and chattering,” he wrote, and he was faced by men armed with bows and arrows. “My name is John, I love you and Jesus loves you,” he shouted before retreating.
The second day, he kayaked to the island and tried to offer the tribe small gifts — fish, scissors, cord and safety pins. A man in white with a crown, possibly made of flowers, shouted at him. He responded by singing “worship songs and hymns” and the tribe fell silent. A juvenile fired an arrow at him, piercing his waterproof Bible. Chau fled on foot through the mangroves.
“Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?” he wrote.
By the third day, he became convinced he was going to die.
“Watching the sunset and it’s beautiful — crying a bit . . . wondering if it will be the last sunset I see,” he wrote. He asked the fishermen to drop him on the beach. They returned the next day and saw the tribesmen dragging Chau’s body.
Those fishermen have been arrested, as has a friend of Chau’s who helped organize the boat trip. Police do not yet have a strategy to retrieve his body and do not plan to confront the islanders, Pathak said.
Chau’s friends from the islands are still grieving and mystified by the whole episode.
“He lost his mind, definitely,” Snoeij said. “But ask any adventurer. You have to lose your mind a little bit, otherwise you don’t do it.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
On Instagram, John A. Chau came off like a carefree young adventurer — climbing mountain peaks and exploring jungles. But in reality, the missionary harbored a deadly obsession with an isolated tribe in India he’d first read about as a teen.
Chau spent years planning and training to travel illegally to remote North Sentinel Island on a mission to convert its residents to Christianity, including learning emergency medicine, and studying linguistics and cultural anthropology, his missionary group said. Though he knew the islanders had long violently resisted outsiders, he conducted a covert mission to the protected island this month. Police said that shortly after he arrived at the island this month, the tribe killed him. Indian authorities say they have yet to recover the body.
The death of the 26-year-old missionary from Washington state — who broke a raft of laws and put the health of the indigenous people at risk — has sparked international outrage, a heated debate about the protection of tribal communities and at least two investigations by authorities in India. It also has prompted soul-searching in the U.S. evangelical community, which has been debating whether Chau was a martyr, a fool or was afflicted by a messiah complex.
“God, I don’t want to die,” Chau scrawled in his journal while sitting in a fishing boat off the coast of the island where the North Sentinelese people live, shortly before he was killed. “WHO WILL TAKE MY PLACE IF I DO?”
Chau, easygoing and friendly, seemed like any other backpacker when he showed up at Remco Snoeij’s dive shop in 2016 on Havelock Island — in India’s Andaman and Nicobar island chain — and said he wanted to learn to scuba dive.
Chau’s time on the island, a diver’s haven, was largely unremarkable. He stayed in a house called Scubaluv, which was filled with “chattering geckos,” swam with parrotfish and snapped pictures of blue coral for his Instagram account, where he had 17,000 followers.
Yet Snoeij recalled that Chau seemed intently interested in the North Sentinelese tribe, which lived a Stone Age existence on a nearby island, protected by a three-mile, exclusion zone imposed by the Indian government. The tribe has long resisted outside human contact; when Indian helicopters flew overhead after the 2004 tsunami, members of the tribe fired arrows and threw spears.
Snoeij told Chau that the island was off-limits, but on dive excursions, he regaled the American with local lore — about the two fishermen who traveled to the island in 2006 and were strangled by islanders, about the rumors that the Japanese military had buried gold there during World War II.
“He shared a keen interest in researching and knowing more about them,” Snoeij said. “It must have struck a chord.”
Chau later told other friends he was on a kind of reconnaissance mission; police said that on his last trip to the island, he spent time studying how to circumvent military patrols.
Chau had a “very meticulous plan to camouflage his expedition as fishing activity,” said Dependra Pathak, the director general of police for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
The son of a doctor who fled China during the Cultural Revolution, Chau had been fascinated with the outdoors since he pulled a dusty copy of “Robinson Crusoe” off his father’s bookshelf as a child, he told an online wilderness adventure journal. He later read the novel “The Sign of the Beaver,” about a boy who is left alone and guards his family’s log cabin with the help of a Native American friend.
That book “inspired my brother and I to paint our faces with wild blackberry juice and to tramp through our backyard with bows and spears we created from sticks,” Chau recalled.
In an email, Chau’s father, Patrick, declined to comment, saying the family needs peace. U.S. missionary killed by tribe on remote Indian island
Chau majored in sports medicine at Oral Roberts University, graduating in 2014, and he volunteered for soccer programs in Iraq and South Africa. He lived in a cabin for three summers in Whiskeytown National Recreation Area in California; at one point, he was hospitalized after being bitten by a rattlesnake.
A friend, John Middleton Ramsey, 22, recalls that in 2016 Chau stayed with him in Bellingham, Wash., and that the island in the Andaman Sea was much on his mind. Chau confided that he was avoiding romantic attachments because of his planned mission.
“He knew of the dangers of this place,” Ramsey recalled. “He didn’t want any hearts to get broken should something go wrong. He was very much aware of what he was doing. He also knew it wasn’t exactly legal.”
That year, Chau joined forces with All Nations, a missionary group based in Kansas City, Mo., that sends Christian missionaries to 40 countries. The group provided him training and support, according to Mary Ho, its international executive leader. She was surprised by the “soft-spoken, very gentle young man” who had a very “radical call” to find “unreached groups.”
“You could see that every decision he has made, every step he has taken since then was driven by his desire to be among the North Sentinelese people,” Ho said. He planned to live there for years and hoped to learn their language.
Ho said the group was aware that Chau had traveled to India as a tourist, without the proper missionary visa, because missionary visas “aren’t easy to come by.” Ho insisted that Chau had not violated any laws, though authorities in India said he clearly did.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, says Chau violated the country’s aboriginal and forest protection laws as well as cultural norms.
“He repeatedly trespassed on this island, and they lost their patience with him,” Chellaney said. “There is faith, and there is mental illness. . . . He didn’t understand the line between faith and doing something that’s absolutely nutty.”
Chau’s diary, which his family provided to The Washington Post, unfolds like the adventure novels he once read. He arrived in the Andamans on Oct. 16 and paid fishermen to take him by boat at night to the island on Nov. 14, evading the lights of patrols on the way. When the sun broke, Chau drew near the tribe. The women began “looing and chattering,” he wrote, and he was faced by men armed with bows and arrows. “My name is John, I love you and Jesus loves you,” he shouted before retreating.
The second day, he kayaked to the island and tried to offer the tribe small gifts — fish, scissors, cord and safety pins. A man in white with a crown, possibly made of flowers, shouted at him. He responded by singing “worship songs and hymns” and the tribe fell silent. A juvenile fired an arrow at him, piercing his waterproof Bible. Chau fled on foot through the mangroves.
“Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?” he wrote.
By the third day, he became convinced he was going to die.
“Watching the sunset and it’s beautiful — crying a bit . . . wondering if it will be the last sunset I see,” he wrote. He asked the fishermen to drop him on the beach. They returned the next day and saw the tribesmen dragging Chau’s body.
Those fishermen have been arrested, as has a friend of Chau’s who helped organize the boat trip. Police do not yet have a strategy to retrieve his body and do not plan to confront the islanders, Pathak said.
Chau’s friends from the islands are still grieving and mystified by the whole episode.
“He lost his mind, definitely,” Snoeij said. “But ask any adventurer. You have to lose your mind a little bit, otherwise you don’t do it.”
I think we can rule out “naive”, as some have claimed. This was far more willfully defiant.
my small self... like a book amongst the many on a shelf
On Instagram, John A. Chau came off like a carefree young adventurer — climbing mountain peaks and exploring jungles. But in reality, the missionary harbored a deadly obsession with an isolated tribe in India he’d first read about as a teen.
Chau spent years planning and training to travel illegally to remote North Sentinel Island on a mission to convert its residents to Christianity, including learning emergency medicine, and studying linguistics and cultural anthropology, his missionary group said. Though he knew the islanders had long violently resisted outsiders, he conducted a covert mission to the protected island this month. Police said that shortly after he arrived at the island this month, the tribe killed him. Indian authorities say they have yet to recover the body.
The death of the 26-year-old missionary from Washington state — who broke a raft of laws and put the health of the indigenous people at risk — has sparked international outrage, a heated debate about the protection of tribal communities and at least two investigations by authorities in India. It also has prompted soul-searching in the U.S. evangelical community, which has been debating whether Chau was a martyr, a fool or was afflicted by a messiah complex.
“God, I don’t want to die,” Chau scrawled in his journal while sitting in a fishing boat off the coast of the island where the North Sentinelese people live, shortly before he was killed. “WHO WILL TAKE MY PLACE IF I DO?”
Chau, easygoing and friendly, seemed like any other backpacker when he showed up at Remco Snoeij’s dive shop in 2016 on Havelock Island — in India’s Andaman and Nicobar island chain — and said he wanted to learn to scuba dive.
Chau’s time on the island, a diver’s haven, was largely unremarkable. He stayed in a house called Scubaluv, which was filled with “chattering geckos,” swam with parrotfish and snapped pictures of blue coral for his Instagram account, where he had 17,000 followers.
Yet Snoeij recalled that Chau seemed intently interested in the North Sentinelese tribe, which lived a Stone Age existence on a nearby island, protected by a three-mile, exclusion zone imposed by the Indian government. The tribe has long resisted outside human contact; when Indian helicopters flew overhead after the 2004 tsunami, members of the tribe fired arrows and threw spears.
Snoeij told Chau that the island was off-limits, but on dive excursions, he regaled the American with local lore — about the two fishermen who traveled to the island in 2006 and were strangled by islanders, about the rumors that the Japanese military had buried gold there during World War II.
“He shared a keen interest in researching and knowing more about them,” Snoeij said. “It must have struck a chord.”
Chau later told other friends he was on a kind of reconnaissance mission; police said that on his last trip to the island, he spent time studying how to circumvent military patrols.
Chau had a “very meticulous plan to camouflage his expedition as fishing activity,” said Dependra Pathak, the director general of police for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
The son of a doctor who fled China during the Cultural Revolution, Chau had been fascinated with the outdoors since he pulled a dusty copy of “Robinson Crusoe” off his father’s bookshelf as a child, he told an online wilderness adventure journal. He later read the novel “The Sign of the Beaver,” about a boy who is left alone and guards his family’s log cabin with the help of a Native American friend.
That book “inspired my brother and I to paint our faces with wild blackberry juice and to tramp through our backyard with bows and spears we created from sticks,” Chau recalled.
In an email, Chau’s father, Patrick, declined to comment, saying the family needs peace. U.S. missionary killed by tribe on remote Indian island
Chau majored in sports medicine at Oral Roberts University, graduating in 2014, and he volunteered for soccer programs in Iraq and South Africa. He lived in a cabin for three summers in Whiskeytown National Recreation Area in California; at one point, he was hospitalized after being bitten by a rattlesnake.
A friend, John Middleton Ramsey, 22, recalls that in 2016 Chau stayed with him in Bellingham, Wash., and that the island in the Andaman Sea was much on his mind. Chau confided that he was avoiding romantic attachments because of his planned mission.
“He knew of the dangers of this place,” Ramsey recalled. “He didn’t want any hearts to get broken should something go wrong. He was very much aware of what he was doing. He also knew it wasn’t exactly legal.”
That year, Chau joined forces with All Nations, a missionary group based in Kansas City, Mo., that sends Christian missionaries to 40 countries. The group provided him training and support, according to Mary Ho, its international executive leader. She was surprised by the “soft-spoken, very gentle young man” who had a very “radical call” to find “unreached groups.”
“You could see that every decision he has made, every step he has taken since then was driven by his desire to be among the North Sentinelese people,” Ho said. He planned to live there for years and hoped to learn their language.
Ho said the group was aware that Chau had traveled to India as a tourist, without the proper missionary visa, because missionary visas “aren’t easy to come by.” Ho insisted that Chau had not violated any laws, though authorities in India said he clearly did.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, says Chau violated the country’s aboriginal and forest protection laws as well as cultural norms.
“He repeatedly trespassed on this island, and they lost their patience with him,” Chellaney said. “There is faith, and there is mental illness. . . . He didn’t understand the line between faith and doing something that’s absolutely nutty.”
Chau’s diary, which his family provided to The Washington Post, unfolds like the adventure novels he once read. He arrived in the Andamans on Oct. 16 and paid fishermen to take him by boat at night to the island on Nov. 14, evading the lights of patrols on the way. When the sun broke, Chau drew near the tribe. The women began “looing and chattering,” he wrote, and he was faced by men armed with bows and arrows. “My name is John, I love you and Jesus loves you,” he shouted before retreating.
The second day, he kayaked to the island and tried to offer the tribe small gifts — fish, scissors, cord and safety pins. A man in white with a crown, possibly made of flowers, shouted at him. He responded by singing “worship songs and hymns” and the tribe fell silent. A juvenile fired an arrow at him, piercing his waterproof Bible. Chau fled on foot through the mangroves.
“Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?” he wrote.
By the third day, he became convinced he was going to die.
“Watching the sunset and it’s beautiful — crying a bit . . . wondering if it will be the last sunset I see,” he wrote. He asked the fishermen to drop him on the beach. They returned the next day and saw the tribesmen dragging Chau’s body.
Those fishermen have been arrested, as has a friend of Chau’s who helped organize the boat trip. Police do not yet have a strategy to retrieve his body and do not plan to confront the islanders, Pathak said.
Chau’s friends from the islands are still grieving and mystified by the whole episode.
“He lost his mind, definitely,” Snoeij said. “But ask any adventurer. You have to lose your mind a little bit, otherwise you don’t do it.”
I think we can rule out “naive”, as some have claimed. This was far more willfully defiant.
I think some may have supposed "naive" in the absence of anything else concrete. obviously now we know that's not the case.
Hugh Freaking Dillon is currently out of the office, returning sometime in the fall
Idiot is right. Glad he's not around to hassle the natives anymore and potentially disrupt their existence. Hopefully other religious zealots will learn something from this, but his type of religious fervor borders on psychosis as far as I'm concerned. Most of these evangelical missionary efforts are at best misguided. But some are clearly dangerous and delusional. The idea that he could land on an island, tell the people in English that Jesus loves them, and expect to "save their souls" is completely idiotic. No sympathy here. Only disgust.
"I'll use the magic word - let's just shut the fuck up, please." EV, 04/13/08
On Instagram, John A. Chau came off like a carefree young adventurer — climbing mountain peaks and exploring jungles. But in reality, the missionary harbored a deadly obsession with an isolated tribe in India he’d first read about as a teen.
Chau spent years planning and training to travel illegally to remote North Sentinel Island on a mission to convert its residents to Christianity, including learning emergency medicine, and studying linguistics and cultural anthropology, his missionary group said. Though he knew the islanders had long violently resisted outsiders, he conducted a covert mission to the protected island this month. Police said that shortly after he arrived at the island this month, the tribe killed him. Indian authorities say they have yet to recover the body.
The death of the 26-year-old missionary from Washington state — who broke a raft of laws and put the health of the indigenous people at risk — has sparked international outrage, a heated debate about the protection of tribal communities and at least two investigations by authorities in India. It also has prompted soul-searching in the U.S. evangelical community, which has been debating whether Chau was a martyr, a fool or was afflicted by a messiah complex.
“God, I don’t want to die,” Chau scrawled in his journal while sitting in a fishing boat off the coast of the island where the North Sentinelese people live, shortly before he was killed. “WHO WILL TAKE MY PLACE IF I DO?”
Chau, easygoing and friendly, seemed like any other backpacker when he showed up at Remco Snoeij’s dive shop in 2016 on Havelock Island — in India’s Andaman and Nicobar island chain — and said he wanted to learn to scuba dive.
Chau’s time on the island, a diver’s haven, was largely unremarkable. He stayed in a house called Scubaluv, which was filled with “chattering geckos,” swam with parrotfish and snapped pictures of blue coral for his Instagram account, where he had 17,000 followers.
Yet Snoeij recalled that Chau seemed intently interested in the North Sentinelese tribe, which lived a Stone Age existence on a nearby island, protected by a three-mile, exclusion zone imposed by the Indian government. The tribe has long resisted outside human contact; when Indian helicopters flew overhead after the 2004 tsunami, members of the tribe fired arrows and threw spears.
Snoeij told Chau that the island was off-limits, but on dive excursions, he regaled the American with local lore — about the two fishermen who traveled to the island in 2006 and were strangled by islanders, about the rumors that the Japanese military had buried gold there during World War II.
“He shared a keen interest in researching and knowing more about them,” Snoeij said. “It must have struck a chord.”
Chau later told other friends he was on a kind of reconnaissance mission; police said that on his last trip to the island, he spent time studying how to circumvent military patrols.
Chau had a “very meticulous plan to camouflage his expedition as fishing activity,” said Dependra Pathak, the director general of police for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
The son of a doctor who fled China during the Cultural Revolution, Chau had been fascinated with the outdoors since he pulled a dusty copy of “Robinson Crusoe” off his father’s bookshelf as a child, he told an online wilderness adventure journal. He later read the novel “The Sign of the Beaver,” about a boy who is left alone and guards his family’s log cabin with the help of a Native American friend.
That book “inspired my brother and I to paint our faces with wild blackberry juice and to tramp through our backyard with bows and spears we created from sticks,” Chau recalled.
In an email, Chau’s father, Patrick, declined to comment, saying the family needs peace. U.S. missionary killed by tribe on remote Indian island
Chau majored in sports medicine at Oral Roberts University, graduating in 2014, and he volunteered for soccer programs in Iraq and South Africa. He lived in a cabin for three summers in Whiskeytown National Recreation Area in California; at one point, he was hospitalized after being bitten by a rattlesnake.
A friend, John Middleton Ramsey, 22, recalls that in 2016 Chau stayed with him in Bellingham, Wash., and that the island in the Andaman Sea was much on his mind. Chau confided that he was avoiding romantic attachments because of his planned mission.
“He knew of the dangers of this place,” Ramsey recalled. “He didn’t want any hearts to get broken should something go wrong. He was very much aware of what he was doing. He also knew it wasn’t exactly legal.”
That year, Chau joined forces with All Nations, a missionary group based in Kansas City, Mo., that sends Christian missionaries to 40 countries. The group provided him training and support, according to Mary Ho, its international executive leader. She was surprised by the “soft-spoken, very gentle young man” who had a very “radical call” to find “unreached groups.”
“You could see that every decision he has made, every step he has taken since then was driven by his desire to be among the North Sentinelese people,” Ho said. He planned to live there for years and hoped to learn their language.
Ho said the group was aware that Chau had traveled to India as a tourist, without the proper missionary visa, because missionary visas “aren’t easy to come by.” Ho insisted that Chau had not violated any laws, though authorities in India said he clearly did.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, says Chau violated the country’s aboriginal and forest protection laws as well as cultural norms.
“He repeatedly trespassed on this island, and they lost their patience with him,” Chellaney said. “There is faith, and there is mental illness. . . . He didn’t understand the line between faith and doing something that’s absolutely nutty.”
Chau’s diary, which his family provided to The Washington Post, unfolds like the adventure novels he once read. He arrived in the Andamans on Oct. 16 and paid fishermen to take him by boat at night to the island on Nov. 14, evading the lights of patrols on the way. When the sun broke, Chau drew near the tribe. The women began “looing and chattering,” he wrote, and he was faced by men armed with bows and arrows. “My name is John, I love you and Jesus loves you,” he shouted before retreating.
The second day, he kayaked to the island and tried to offer the tribe small gifts — fish, scissors, cord and safety pins. A man in white with a crown, possibly made of flowers, shouted at him. He responded by singing “worship songs and hymns” and the tribe fell silent. A juvenile fired an arrow at him, piercing his waterproof Bible. Chau fled on foot through the mangroves.
“Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?” he wrote.
By the third day, he became convinced he was going to die.
“Watching the sunset and it’s beautiful — crying a bit . . . wondering if it will be the last sunset I see,” he wrote. He asked the fishermen to drop him on the beach. They returned the next day and saw the tribesmen dragging Chau’s body.
Those fishermen have been arrested, as has a friend of Chau’s who helped organize the boat trip. Police do not yet have a strategy to retrieve his body and do not plan to confront the islanders, Pathak said.
Chau’s friends from the islands are still grieving and mystified by the whole episode.
“He lost his mind, definitely,” Snoeij said. “But ask any adventurer. You have to lose your mind a little bit, otherwise you don’t do it.”
I think we can rule out “naive”, as some have claimed. This was far more willfully defiant.
He was clearly an asshole.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy. ~ Desiderata
Idiot is right. Glad he's not around to hassle the natives anymore and potentially disrupt their existence. Hopefully other religious zealots will learn something from this, but his type of religious fervor borders on psychosis as far as I'm concerned. Most of these evangelical missionary efforts are at best misguided. But some are clearly dangerous and delusional. The idea that he could land on an island, tell the people in English that Jesus loves them, and expect to "save their souls" is completely idiotic. No sympathy here. Only disgust.
A few hundred years ago we would have loaded up some ships and annihilated the tribe. MAGA
Remember the Thomas Nine !! (10/02/2018) The Golden Age is 2 months away. And guess what….. you’re gonna love it! (teskeinc 11.19.24)
1998: Noblesville; 2003: Noblesville; 2009: EV Nashville, Chicago, Chicago 2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy 2013: London ON, Wrigley; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE) 2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston 2020: Oakland, Oakland:2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana 2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville 2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana; 2025: Pitt1, Pitt2
Reading that and all I can say is "what a fucking idiot". Either an idiot or severely mentally disturbed.
“God, I don’t want to die,” Chau scrawled in his journal while sitting in a fishing boat off the coast of the island where the North Sentinelese people live, shortly before he was killed. “WHO WILL TAKE MY PLACE IF I DO?”
Hopefully noone will take your place.....
Adelaide 17/11/2009, Melbourne 20/11/2009, Sydney 22/11/2009, Melbourne (Big Day Out Festival) 24/01/2014
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Comments
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Large scale: crusades.
Small scale: Native American experiences (in particular the residential school experiences).
HAHAHA
November 27 at 7:28 PM
On Instagram, John A. Chau came off like a carefree young adventurer — climbing mountain peaks and exploring jungles. But in reality, the missionary harbored a deadly obsession with an isolated tribe in India he’d first read about as a teen.
Chau spent years planning and training to travel illegally to remote North Sentinel Island on a mission to convert its residents to Christianity, including learning emergency medicine, and studying linguistics and cultural anthropology, his missionary group said. Though he knew the islanders had long violently resisted outsiders, he conducted a covert mission to the protected island this month. Police said that shortly after he arrived at the island this month, the tribe killed him. Indian authorities say they have yet to recover the body.
The death of the 26-year-old missionary from Washington state — who broke a raft of laws and put the health of the indigenous people at risk — has sparked international outrage, a heated debate about the protection of tribal communities and at least two investigations by authorities in India. It also has prompted soul-searching in the U.S. evangelical community, which has been debating whether Chau was a martyr, a fool or was afflicted by a messiah complex.
“God, I don’t want to die,” Chau scrawled in his journal while sitting in a fishing boat off the coast of the island where the North Sentinelese people live, shortly before he was killed. “WHO WILL TAKE MY PLACE IF I DO?”
Chau, easygoing and friendly, seemed like any other backpacker when he showed up at Remco Snoeij’s dive shop in 2016 on Havelock Island — in India’s Andaman and Nicobar island chain — and said he wanted to learn to scuba dive.
Chau’s time on the island, a diver’s haven, was largely unremarkable. He stayed in a house called Scubaluv, which was filled with “chattering geckos,” swam with parrotfish and snapped pictures of blue coral for his Instagram account, where he had 17,000 followers.
Yet Snoeij recalled that Chau seemed intently interested in the North Sentinelese tribe, which lived a Stone Age existence on a nearby island, protected by a three-mile, exclusion zone imposed by the Indian government. The tribe has long resisted outside human contact; when Indian helicopters flew overhead after the 2004 tsunami, members of the tribe fired arrows and threw spears.
Snoeij told Chau that the island was off-limits, but on dive excursions, he regaled the American with local lore — about the two fishermen who traveled to the island in 2006 and were strangled by islanders, about the rumors that the Japanese military had buried gold there during World War II.
“He shared a keen interest in researching and knowing more about them,” Snoeij said. “It must have struck a chord.”
Chau later told other friends he was on a kind of reconnaissance mission; police said that on his last trip to the island, he spent time studying how to circumvent military patrols.
Chau had a “very meticulous plan to camouflage his expedition as fishing activity,” said Dependra Pathak, the director general of police for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
The son of a doctor who fled China during the Cultural Revolution, Chau had been fascinated with the outdoors since he pulled a dusty copy of “Robinson Crusoe” off his father’s bookshelf as a child, he told an online wilderness adventure journal. He later read the novel “The Sign of the Beaver,” about a boy who is left alone and guards his family’s log cabin with the help of a Native American friend.
That book “inspired my brother and I to paint our faces with wild blackberry juice and to tramp through our backyard with bows and spears we created from sticks,” Chau recalled.
In an email, Chau’s father, Patrick, declined to comment, saying the family needs peace.
U.S. missionary killed by tribe on remote Indian island
A friend, John Middleton Ramsey, 22, recalls that in 2016 Chau stayed with him in Bellingham, Wash., and that the island in the Andaman Sea was much on his mind. Chau confided that he was avoiding romantic attachments because of his planned mission.
“He knew of the dangers of this place,” Ramsey recalled. “He didn’t want any hearts to get broken should something go wrong. He was very much aware of what he was doing. He also knew it wasn’t exactly legal.”
That year, Chau joined forces with All Nations, a missionary group based in Kansas City, Mo., that sends Christian missionaries to 40 countries. The group provided him training and support, according to Mary Ho, its international executive leader. She was surprised by the “soft-spoken, very gentle young man” who had a very “radical call” to find “unreached groups.”
“You could see that every decision he has made, every step he has taken since then was driven by his desire to be among the North Sentinelese people,” Ho said. He planned to live there for years and hoped to learn their language.
Ho said the group was aware that Chau had traveled to India as a tourist, without the proper missionary visa, because missionary visas “aren’t easy to come by.” Ho insisted that Chau had not violated any laws, though authorities in India said he clearly did.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, says Chau violated the country’s aboriginal and forest protection laws as well as cultural norms.
“He repeatedly trespassed on this island, and they lost their patience with him,” Chellaney said. “There is faith, and there is mental illness. . . . He didn’t understand the line between faith and doing something that’s absolutely nutty.”
Chau’s diary, which his family provided to The Washington Post, unfolds like the adventure novels he once read. He arrived in the Andamans on Oct. 16 and paid fishermen to take him by boat at night to the island on Nov. 14, evading the lights of patrols on the way. When the sun broke, Chau drew near the tribe. The women began “looing and chattering,” he wrote, and he was faced by men armed with bows and arrows. “My name is John, I love you and Jesus loves you,” he shouted before retreating.
The second day, he kayaked to the island and tried to offer the tribe small gifts — fish, scissors, cord and safety pins. A man in white with a crown, possibly made of flowers, shouted at him. He responded by singing “worship songs and hymns” and the tribe fell silent. A juvenile fired an arrow at him, piercing his waterproof Bible. Chau fled on foot through the mangroves.
“Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?” he wrote.
By the third day, he became convinced he was going to die.
“Watching the sunset and it’s beautiful — crying a bit . . . wondering if it will be the last sunset I see,” he wrote. He asked the fishermen to drop him on the beach. They returned the next day and saw the tribesmen dragging Chau’s body.
Those fishermen have been arrested, as has a friend of Chau’s who helped organize the boat trip. Police do not yet have a strategy to retrieve his body and do not plan to confront the islanders, Pathak said.
Chau’s friends from the islands are still grieving and mystified by the whole episode.
“He lost his mind, definitely,” Snoeij said. “But ask any adventurer. You have to lose your mind a little bit, otherwise you don’t do it.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
The Golden Age is 2 months away. And guess what….. you’re gonna love it! (teskeinc 11.19.24)
1998: Noblesville; 2003: Noblesville; 2009: EV Nashville, Chicago, Chicago
2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy
2013: London ON, Wrigley; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE)
2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston
2020: Oakland, Oakland: 2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana
2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville
2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana; 2025: Pitt1, Pitt2
Jesus and the bible YES!
The Golden Age is 2 months away. And guess what….. you’re gonna love it! (teskeinc 11.19.24)
1998: Noblesville; 2003: Noblesville; 2009: EV Nashville, Chicago, Chicago
2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy
2013: London ON, Wrigley; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE)
2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston
2020: Oakland, Oakland: 2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana
2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville
2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana; 2025: Pitt1, Pitt2
https://edmontonjournal.com/news/world/he-lost-his-mind-friend-says-of-u-s-missionary-was-obsessed-with-isolated-north-sentinel-tribe-that-killed-him/wcm/9f45fcfd-3740-479b-806c-0a275fbec93f?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR1rFNGwq210zMns-FAxY3kuXl5OPShtgyTj9_IJIxuBpXgC-30zE_rRQ-A#Echobox=1543430794
Either an idiot or severely mentally disturbed.
“God, I don’t want to die,” Chau scrawled in his journal while sitting in a fishing boat off the coast of the island where the North Sentinelese people live, shortly before he was killed. “WHO WILL TAKE MY PLACE IF I DO?”
Hopefully noone will take your place.....
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
hahahahahaha