This article was written by David Allan Van Nostrand
In the news recently was the story of an American tourist arrested for leaving a soft drink can on a remote island 800 miles east of India’s mainland. It doesn’t sound like much of reason to be arrested for until we are aware of the context and details.
Now all outsiders are banned by law from coming within three miles of this island. The idea is to protect the few hundred indigenous people living on North Sentinel Island from disease and allow them to preserve their way of life undisturbed by outsiders. This Ugly American describes himself as a YouTube travel influencer who takes videos of himself visiting high-risk areas. His Go Pro footage described him as “claiming unofficial representation of the US”.
He is accused of attempting to “interact with the Sentinelese tribe,” the police said in a statement. The New York Times says “Mr. Polyakov is being held on charges that include violating a law protecting aboriginal tribes and is scheduled to appear in court on April 17. The charges carry a possible sentence of up to five years in prison and a fine.”
Carolina Pearce, director of Survival International had this to say: ”It beggars belief that someone could be that reckless and idiotic. This person’s actions not only endangered his own life, they put the lives of the entire Sentinelese tribe at risk. It’s very well known by now that uncontacted peoples have no immunity to common outside diseases like flu or measles, which could completely wipe them out.”
The intrusion of people from modern societies into primitive cultures turned everything upside down
It is hardly possible for to imagine the upheaval caused by these strange people with their strange appearances, behaviors, clothes, machines, and goods. One issue among behavioral scientists was the social change caused by people from more advanced societies invading the lives of people so simple they had no written language.
Sociologists and anthropologists came to agree that when they went among natives to learn about them, they were also affecting their lives, and not always in good ways
The current line of thinking is that we should stop trying to jerk every primitive person into the 21st century and leave them to live their lives their way.
The word indigenous has been around for hundreds of years
Only recently has it come into usage by non-scientists. It means born in a particular place; a native; a part of a tribal group that predates technology. When we switched over to indigenous from native, many things were renamed to reflect their true origins, not the names given to make some European king or queen happy. Eskimos became Aleutian Islanders; Burma became Myanmar; Siam; became Thailand; and it’s Istanbul (Not Constantinople). You can hear the song here. Because this story happened long ago, I’ll be using the term native.
There are so many islands in the world that no one really knows
The most popular estimate I found says 900,000. More than 730 million people live on fewer than 20,000 of them. I’ve lived on two in the Pacific and one in the West Indies.
The United States has 18,617 islands. Finland has 180,000. Norway has 270,000, the most of any country.
Nauru, a United Nations member and the third-smallest country in the world, has only one island
Before modern communication and transportation, most of the islands were isolated from the outside world and from each other. One result is that people who lived on islands long ago had a very small world view.
Primitive tribes made everything by hand, including their tools
When outsiders from the modern world came, they brought with them something the natives had never seen before: manufactured goods. Only by imagining something so outrageous that it has never been seen before can we get some sense of how shocked primitive people were when they encounter many things so strange they can’t be fathomed. Imagine we’re walking along the beach in Jamaica and suddenly a thousand-foot-long 7-legged fire-breathing alligator falls from the sky. We’d freak out.
During World War II, millions of Allied soldiers, sailors, and pilots battled their way across the Pacific Ocean, an area more than 60 million square miles
They fought the Japanese, island by island, from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Along the way they encountered plenty of what were called backward tribes among the more than 25,000 Pacific Islands.
The first Allies natives saw were the Navy Construction Battalions
These Seabees (CBs, get it?) came to their islands to build runways for the Air Force. They brought with them cargoes of bulldozers, trucks, jeeps, tools, cigarettes, clothing, potted meat, rice, candy, medicine, lamps, radios, bicycles, and beer.
When the runways were complete, the Navy Seabees went to the next island the Marines had taken from the Japanese and the Air Force and Army moved in, bring even more goods and cargo.
Cargo means freight carried by ships, aircraft, and other methods of delivery
Kago (the native word) began to miraculously appear from the sky in massive birds they had never seen before. The great loud birds that came from the sky had surely come from heaven, because everyone knows heaven is so high in the sky that we can’t see it even from the top of the tallest coconut tree. And these creatures that came from the sky brought many magical things. Remember, these were primitive people, living for centuries without having ever developed a written language.
Natives thought the soldiers were lazy because the never hunted or tended crops or speared fish or crafted anything
Yet when the Americans made marks on leaves with sticks and chanted while marching up and down dressed alike and carrying bang-sticks, the birds would appear, stuffed full of cargo. The obvious-to-them conclusion was that the rituals caused the rewards. Regular readers know that correlation is not causation, but tribal people did not.
How kago arrived
Huge metal (they didn’t know what that was, either) birds came after the soldiers raised flags, made marks on strange leaves with sticks, and sent signals to the sky. Inside these noisy, smelly birds were all manner of goods. The soldiers took the goods from the birds’ belies and the birds flew away to some unknown place, probably heaven.
Devices powered by electricity were even more magical
Somehow human voices came out of small boxes with strings attached. Islanders also observed that the Americans put water inside a tall white box and closed the door. This in itself was strange enough, but when they opened the door, the water had changed into cold hard cubes, truly a miracle. Here was one more thing they valued highly but couldn’t make for themselves.
Stone tools to airplanes is a huge leap to make suddenly
Its equivalent for us would be to go in the blink of an eye from today’s planes and rockets to time travel, the ability to become invisible on demand, and shape shifting when we feel like it.
Cargo cults were native religious groups
They arose when modern goods (cargo) were introduced to societies that had no way of producing them or obtaining them on their own. Natives combined their ancestors-as-gods religions with kago to form a new set of beliefs. One anthropologist catalogued 186 separate and unrelated cargo cults spread across the Pacific from Fiji in the east to Indonesia in the west.
Some criticize the term cargo cult as being based on ethnocentric assumptions and stereotypes about indigenous societies
Easysociology.com says they argue that the term diminishes the complexity and richness of indigenous belief systems and reduces them to mere mimicry of Western practices.
People who like to tell others what to do and say feel compelled to make the point that the term cargo cult is now insensitive
I won’t tiptoe around this either. I call them by their original name, cargo cults. I don’t know about you, but I wish those people who are so quick to judge things that happened in the past would open their eyes and come to grips with the fact that the world they live in now in 2025 has different rules and norms for attitudes and behaviors.
When the war ended, the soldiers and airplanes went away and their goods disappeared along with them
Having observed how the soldiers’ magical cargo was brought by those huge birds, the cargo cultists hypothesized a connection. They reasoned that if they did all the things the Allies did, the big birds would come back and bring them all these goods.
So they set about to do just that
Foreigners had magical powers that allowed them to fly high in the sky, so natives copied their customs by marching in military formation and building radios, runways, control towers, and mock airplanes.
Nobel Prize recipient Richard Feynman wrote a paper that included the following
“During the war, native people across the South Seas saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they wanted the same thing to happen for them. So they built runways, airplanes made of bamboo, and a wooden hut for a man to sit in. He wore wooden pieces on his head shaped like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas. And they waited for the giant birds that would surely come.”
These rituals led to the formation of elaborate myths and theologies
They didn’t know how the Westerners’ things worked. Ignorant of manufacturing, they didn’t know how they were made, either. They concluded that it could only be magic.
Anna Della Subin wrote “A prophecy held that the deity would someday return to Tanna, bringing with Him an end to sickness and death. Life would become eternal; no new babies would need to be born. On the island, prosperity would reign. The harvest would be unending, and fish would jump out of the sea.”
The point of becoming an anthropologist or sociologist is to study and learn about different cultures without judging them or trying to change them
Regular readers know the social sciences call this participant observation. Contrast this with missionaries who came to these remote islands from Catholic, Presbyterian, and Seventh-Day Adventist churches. They had come to convince the savages to give up their essential beliefs and change their primitive ways.
Each preached its own version of the gospel to the natives
And each interfered with the heathens’ way of life, too. The moral crusaders were shocked down to their toes. Some fainted away when they saw the penis sheaths the men wore so the missionaries immediately forced the natives to wear trousers instead. Missionaries also forbade goat sacrifices and the drinking of the native beverage, kava, a psychoactive substance that was central to tribal rituals.
It didn’t take the natives long to notice that adopting these Western religions did not bring back the cargo
As Feyman said, “They did everything right. Their form was perfect. Everything looked exactly the way it looked before. But it didn’t work. No airplanes landed.”
Bonus
The Gods Must Be Crazy
This 1980 film comedy was made with Afrikaans dialogue dubbed into English. It was one of the biggest films in South African history.
The story opens when an African bushman, walking alone in the Kalahari Desert, trips over an artifact of modern civilization when he finds an unbroken glass Coca-Cola bottle that had been dropped from an airplane. This is the first piece of technology he and his tribe have ever seen and so they believe it to be from the gods (again, heaven is on high).
It was the strangest and most beautiful thing they had ever seen
It looked like water, but was hard and heavy. The only drawback was that the gods must have been careless to send only one, the first thing they had ever encountered that could not be shared by all. They used it to carry water, cure snakeskins, pulverize roots, and make music. Every day they discovered a new use for the thing. But because they had only one bottle, jealousy, arguments, and fights disrupted their otherwise peaceful lives.
The tribal elders decided the only solution was for the tribesman who found it to return it to the sky
On his pilgrimage to the edge of the world, the bushman crossed paths with a village school teacher, a biologist who analyzes manure samples for his dissertation, and a band of guerrilla terrorists. When he arrived at the edge of the world, he …
