Don't Glamorize 'Avatar'-A Parallel Story from the Real World - Ancient Tribe Becomes Extinct as Last Member Dies

David Knowles, Writer

Feb. 5) – Marking the end of a language and an entire people, the last member of the Bo, an ancient tribe that lived in the Andaman Islands, has died.

When Boa Sr, as she was known, died last week, she was believed to be about 85 years old. Her husband had died years beforehand, and Boa, whose name means "land" or "earth" in the Bo language, had no children.

The Bo are believed to have first come to the Andaman Islands – located roughly 850 miles off India's east coast in the Bay of Bengal – 65,000 years ago. Bo was one of at least 10 pre-colonial languages spoken on the islands.

According to Survival International, an advocacy group for native peoples throughout the world, the Bo were one of the oldest surviving human cultures on earth.

Of the thousands of Great Andamanese who once inhabited the islands, only 52 people are still alive today. But Boa Sr, who also spoke a local dialect of Hindi as well as the amalgam language called Great Andamanese, was the last of her particular tribe."

After the death of her parents, Boa was the last Bo speaker for 30 to 40 years," Abbi told the BBC.

The video footage above, courtesy of CNN, was recorded over the last few years of Boa's life by Abbi and represents the some of the last recorded utterances and song in Bo.

The Bos' Downfall

In 1858, when the British decided to colonize the Andaman Islands and use them as a penal colony, they estimated that 5,000 Great Andamanese lived there. "

At first, the British didn't notice any difference between the tribes," said Sophie Grig, senior campaigner at Survival International.

But in 1879, a British officer named M.V. Portman was appointed officer in charge of the Andamanese, and after years of attempting to acclimate them to life as British subjects, Portman wrote "A Manual of the Andamanese Languages," which distinguished the differences among tribal languages.

Portman's own obituary, which appeared in The Times on Feb. 22, 1935, reads:

In many parts of the islands the natives were still either ferocious enemies

or at best half-tamed; and his work consisted in making contact with them

and very gradually bringing them to recognize the value of British rule.

But colonization proved ruinous for the tribes of the Andamans, including the Bo, with large numbers decimated by measles and syphilis brought to the islands by foreigners. Many of those who were left gravitated to alcohol, another import to the islands, as a way of seeking solace.

"When people are dispossessed from their land and their way of life, they often turn to alcohol," Grig said. "It's not surprising, and it was very much true in the case of the Bo."

In 1970 the Indian government began relocating the Bo to a settlement of concrete row houses on Strait Island. Boa Sr was moved in 1978, and Abbi said she often said that she missed her old life in the jungle. "

What's important is that we learn from this lesson and do everything we can to protect the remaining tribes like the Jarawa and the Sentinelese, who are still there and remain threatened," Grig said.

Now kept in a protective quarantine by the Indian government, the Sentinelese received worldwide attention in 2004, when they were filmed running out of the jungle firing arrows at passing helicopters shortly after the Asian tsunami killed thousands on the Andaman and Nicobar island chains.

Abbi argues that preventing the extinction of other Andamanese languages is crucial if we hope to expand our understanding of how language in the region evolved over time.

"It is generally believed that all Andamanese languages might be the last representatives of those languages which go back to pre-Neolithic times," Abbi told the BBC.

But the death of a language also has other implications. "

A language contains the memories and experiences, everything that explains and encapsulates a way of life," Grig said. "It's sad for the entire world."

This story is so important, that we're presenting two articles covering the passing of Boa Sr. Each article offers a slightly different perspective, allowing you to grasp this great loss more fully.

Kentke

By Harmeet Shah Singh, CNN


February 5, 2010 10:14 a.m. EST

New Delhi, India (CNN) -- The last member of an ancient tribe that has inhabited an Indian island chain for around 65,000 years has died, a group that campaigns for the protection of indigenous peoples has said.

Boa Sr, who was around 85 years of age, died last week in the Andaman islands, about 750 miles off India's eastern coast, Survival International said in a statement.

The London-based group, which works to protect indigenous peoples, said she was the last member of one of ten distinct Great Andamanese tribes, the Bo.

"The Bo are thought to have lived in the Andaman islands for as long as 65,000 years, making them the descendants of one of the oldest human cultures on earth," it noted.

With her passing at a hospital, India also lost one of its most endangered languages, also called Bo, linguists say.

"She was the last speaker of (the) Bo language. It pains to see how one by one we are losing speakers of Great Andamanese and (their) language is getting extinct. (It is) A very fast erosion of (the) indigenous knowledge base, that we all are helplessly witnessing," read an obituary in Boa Sr's honor posted on the Web site of the Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese (VOGA) project.

Project director Anvita Abbi, a professor at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, met with Boa as recently as last year. "She was the only member who remembered the old songs," Abbi recounted in her obituary.

"Boa Sr was the only speaker of Bo and had no one to converse with in that language," Abbi told CNN. Her husband and children had already died, the linguist said.

Other than Bo, she also knew local Andaman languages, which she would use to converse, according to Abbi.

Boa Sr was believed to be the oldest of the Great Andamanese, members of ten distinct tribes. Survival International estimates there are now just 52 Great Andamanese left.

There were believed to be 5,000 of them when the British colonized the archipelago in 1858. Most of those tribal communities were subsequently killed or died of diseases, says Survival International.

The British also held the indigenous tribes people captive in what was called an Andaman Home, but none of the 150 children born there survived beyond two years of age, according to the group.

Boa Sr also survived the killer Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.

She recorded in Bo what she saw when the giant waves arrived. "While we were all asleep, the water rose and filled all around. We did not get up before the water rose. Water filled where we were and as the morning broke the water started to recede," reads a translation of her tsunami narrative posted on the VOGA Web site.

Activists are expressing alarm over her death.

"Boa's loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman islands," Survival director Stephen Corry said in the statement. Andaman and Nicobar Islands authorities put at least five tribes in their list of vulnerable indigenous communities.
According to Corry's group, the surviving Great Andamanese depend largely on the Indian government for food and shelter and abuse of alcohol is rife.

Among the tribes are the Sentinelese, who inhabit a 60-square-kilometer island.

Officials believe the group is probably the world's only surviving Paleolithic people without contact with any other community. They said the Sentinelese are very hostile and never leave their Island. Very little is known about them.