In the past, the Anambé Indians lived West of the Tocantins River, on the headwaters of the Pacajá River, which empties into the Pará River (an arm of the estuary of the Amazon River that runs South of Marajó Island), near Portel. According to a narrative of an Anambé leader taken by researcher Fereira Pena in 1884, they had lived for a long time on the headwaters of the Pacajá, under the orders of a wise warior leader who came from the West. The whites first came to wedge war against them; then the Jesuits, who were at peace with the Anambé, began to separate wives from husbands and take many of them to Portel, the men to work on the roças (planting fields) and to become oarsmen, the women to wash clothes and cook. That displeased the Anambé very much, leading them to disobbey the chief and to break up from the others. Cannibal Indians then came to make war against them, so they moved to the headwaters of the Cururuí River, a tributary of the Pacajá, where they formed the village of Tauá, from where later they moved to a place where the director of Indians tried to group them into a village manned by whites. In 1852, in fact, part of the Anambé came to the left bank of the Tocantins, asked for protection and was placed in a village close to the district of Baião. The others remained on the upper Pacajá. By 1874, after a war against the Indians called "Curumbu", they had been reduced to 46 individuals; the following year, 37 of them died of smallpox. The survivors joined the Anambé who were living on the village by the Tocantins River. The Anambé thus started to live in the vicinity of the city of Baião, on the islands of Santos and Tauá. Until the end of the 19th Century, the Anambé moved back and forth from the Tocantins and the Pacajá, until they eventually crossed to the east bank of the Tocantins and into the basin of the Moju River.

The first records of the presence of the Anambé in the Moju River basin confuse them either with the Turiwara or with the Amanayé. According to what the Amambé told anthropologist Napoleão Figueiredo, they entered the headwaters of the Moju with the Gaviões do Oeste Indians, who later expelled them, thus forcing them to move towards the Cairari. At first they were the only inhabitants of the upper Cairari, but as of mid-20th Century loggers and gatherers of balata started to come into the area. In the beginning the Anambé did not get involved in timber extraction, instead selling furs, meat of wild animals and flour. In the 1970s, a few Anambé worked as loggers on a daily basis, while others sold wood to a regatão (Amazon merchant who ply the region's rivers selling merchandise and buying local products), who generally worked for the same timber company. But the involvement of the Amambé with logging was intermittent then, and became only occasional in the following decade.