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During the 19th Century, many voyagers traveled along the Arinos-Juruena-Tapajós route, which at the time connected Cuiabá and Belém. Those travelers developed peaceful relations with the Apiaká, exchanging products with them and employing them as guides and oarsmen in some of their travels.

The use of the Apiaká workforce was such that, at the turn of the 20th Century, the Indians were integrated into extractivist activities working as boatmen, loaders, fishermen, hunters and caucheiros (rubber gatherers), combining their traditional way of life with that of the regional non-Indian population. But in the beginning of the 20th Century, local rubber gatherers promoted several massacres against the Apiaká, whom after that were unable to preserve their traditional ways. In the following years, they mixed with members of other ethnic groups - Kokama, Kayabí, Munduruku, Maué, Pareci -, in addition to non-Indians. The Kokama were an interesting case: since this group lives far away, on the upper Solimões, marriages ended up occurring with individuals of that ethnic group that went down the Amazon River and Apiaká who sailed down the Tapajós River to Santarém.

During the 19th Century, the Apiaká left the confluence of the Arinos and Juruena rivers and the surrounding area: part of them moved North, along the Juruena; the other moved East to the São Manoel (or Teles Pires) River, where, by the end of the century, they were known as Pari-bi-teté, a term of the Mundurukú language that refers to a tattoo the Apiaká use around their lips (Nimuendajú, 1948, p. 312).

In the 1960s, a group of Apiaká families made the trip back to the South in search of a “good boss”. The Jesuit missionary João Dornstauder ran into them and invited them to settle near the Kayabí, on the Peixes River. From then on, more families made the same move, forming the villages of Nova Esperança (1968), Mayrob (1982) and Tatuí (1986), all of them in the area that later became the Apiaká Indigenous Land.