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The first " civilized people" to reach the territory occupied by the Apinajé were the Jesuits who, between 1633 and 1658, undertook four expeditions up the Tocantins, for the purpose of persuading the Indians to " descend" the river to the villages of Parà. As the routes along the Araguaia and Tocantins were opened up, contacts with the indigenous groups which inhabited this region became more constant and the references to the Apinajé ever more precise.

Several colonial expeditions traveled along the Araguaia and Tocantins rivers in the first quarter of the 18th Century, coming not only from the south, but also from Maranhão and Pará, which disputed possession of the rich gold veins recently discovered by the bandeirantes of São Paulo in the south of Goiás. Until the end of the 18^th Century, the Apinajé at various moments entered into hostile contacts with the " civilized" people, undertaking " raids" on the Tocantins to take possession of iron tools.

As a result of these raids, in 1780, the military post of Alcobaça was founded, which, despite its six pieces of artillery, was abandoned due to the incursions of the Apinajé. And, in 1791, another military post was founded on the Arapary river. In 1797 the post of São João das Duas Barras, present-day São João do Araguaia, was founded. This fact marked the establishment of permanent contact between the Apinajé and the national society.

However, the relations between the garrison and the Indians continued to be marked by conflict. In 1810, a merchant founded the place called São Pedro de Alcântara. Establishing friendly relations with the neighboring Krahô, the Apinajé used them to attack other indigenous groups. In 1826, the first settlement, Santo Antônio, was founded in the same territory then occupied by the Apinajé, slightly below the rapids of Três Barras. The Apinajé at that time had five villages. In 1816 this town was incorporated to São Pedro de Alcântara, then forming the city of Carolina, on the Maranhão side of the Tocantins.

In 1824, the small town of Carolina had a population of 81 " whites" and around 120 to 150 Apinajé. In this same year, Cunha Mattos located the Apinajé in four villages with an approximate population of 4,200 Indians. In 1831 Boa Vista was founded, which would become present-day Tocantinópolis, joining together a small northeasterner population, probably consisting of refugees from the frequent conflicts among Northeastern political bosses.

In 1840, Frei Vito founded a mission in one of the Apinajé villages, extending his influence to the other three, reaching a total of approximately three thousand Indians. The oral tradition of the Apinajé does not contain any mention of this mission settlement, and only makes mention of the foundation of Boa Vista from the time of the arrival of Frei Gil Vilanova, at the end of the 19th Century.

In 1850, 31 commercial boats were already sailing along the Tocantins regularly, employing nearly 500 people, while the navigation of the Araguaia continued to be heavily dependent on government help. But even in the second half of the 19^th Century, the Apinajé population was numerically expressive, as shown by several official business reports of the Province at that time. In 1851, the settlement of Bôa Vista was calculated to have 2,822 Indians. In 1877, a new provincial report indicated a population of 1,564 Apinajé, explaining the population decrease to be the result of a measles epidemic.

Contact and depopulation

At the end of the 19th Century, the occupation of the region of the Apinajé became more systematic, initiating a history of conflicts for possession of the land in the place. The consequences of this occupation were devastating: at the same time that the " White" population increased, the Indians suffered a drastic decline in their population. In 1897, Coudreau estimated the Apinajé population to be around 400 people and at the turn of the century, Buscalioni, in his expedition to Goiás, visited the Apinajé of the village of S. Vicente and calculated its population to be around 150 individuals. Thus the Apinajé, who until then had been the most significant human group of the region known as " Parrot’s Beak" or " Triangle of the Tocantins" , entered the new century as an insignificant minority compared to the regional occupants who then were in process of landholding occupation.

In the first years of the 20th Century, a babaçu extractivist front reached the region of the " Parrot’s Beak" , adding to cattle-ranching as one of the principal economic activities. In this region, different from what occurred in the rubber and castanha extraction zones, more to the north, no economic activity was dominant over the others. Cattle-ranching lost its force when the Northeastern expansion front crossed the Tocantins, due to the difficulties of transporting the cattle to the consumer markets of the Northeast.

Babaçu, which was sold for less and was less affected by fluctuations in the international market, unlike rubber and castanha, never came to involve all of the population of the municipality. Thus, the settling of the Apinajé territory occurred in a relatively constant fashion during the 20th Century, without abrupt economic and social changes. This situation was fundamental for the survival of the Apinajé, even though the population diminished significantly in the final years of the 19th Century.

Between 1928 and 1937, Nimuendajú visited the Apinajé several times, presenting a very pessimistic report of the landholding situation in the indigenous territory at that time:

" ...of their ancient territory, hardly a part of it is in the tribe’s possession, for the neo-Brazilian colonists are spread out over all of their traditional habitat, even though sparsely. Up to 20 years ago, no Apinajé even suspected that this might represent a threat for their future. To the contrary, they willingly accepted, for their apparent worth, the claims of friendship of the intruders, and when they opened their eyes it was already too late......all of their territory now has outside owners, and the little that is left runs the risk of being expropriated some day by some sufficiently powerful and unscrupulous rancher."

The possibility of a certain conviviality between the Apinajé and the regional population existed due to the very form of occupation of the region by the national society: a dispersed population, living basically from subsistence agriculture, the raising of small animals and small-scale extraction of babaçu. This population maintained intimate relations with the Apinajé, such as, for example, relations of compadrio [ fictive kinship, relations of godparents], which is common in the areas of peasant populations in the country. This type of relation was never possible, for example, in the areas of castanha-do-Pará nut and rubber extraction, where the organization of labor in the system of the rubber camps prevented any individualized contact with the Indians.

This was, basically, the characterizing feature of the occupation of Apinajé territory by non-Indians until the 1940s, except for the eastern border (territory of the subgroup called Krindjobrêire and present-day municipality of Nazaré), which was occupied by cattle-raisers. Until 1940 there are also continuous records of epidemics (measles, fever, yellow fever) that decimated a large part of the Apinajé population.

Around 1944 the SPI installed in the village of São José (still called Bacaba) an Assistance Post as a way of mediating these conflicts. No doubt the creation of the Post of the SPI helped in the demographic recovery of the group, which had already begun in the 1930s. Despite it’s not being able to avoid new invasions nor even to seek judicial solutions, the SPI institutionalized the practice of " leasing" as a way of showing to the regional population that they " inhabited land that was not theirs" . At the end of the 1950s these leases ceased to be collected and many of the older squatters ended up " selling" their possessions.

With the establishment of the SPI post, the Apinajé were then encouraged by the employees of this agency to get involved in the gathering of babaçu nuts. From the 1970s on, with the FUNAI present in the area, they came to be pressured into producing babaçu on an industrial scale. The FUNAI substituted the SPI trading post with another that was more " business-like" in its dealings, as the intermediary for the commercialization of the babaçu that the Apinajé gathered.

In 1976, the anthropologist Roberto da Matta noted that the Apinajé considered babaçu gathering to be a " necessary evil" : gathering and breaking the nuts was for them a distinctly negative activity when compared to the traditional activities of hunting and agriculture. First because it was a gathering activity and second, because it was an activity for selling which does not imply the same social obligations as hunting and agriculture.

The resources of the CVRD/FUNAI Accord (after 1982) had the effect of consolidating this type of relationship of the FUNAI: in the village of Mariazinha, the Indians were being obliged to sell their production exclusively at the post, without the prior alternative of seeking a buyer who might pay better for the product, and which had as a " counterpart" the FUNAI’s sponsorship of large rice gardens, through " communitarian development projects" . Thus a work regime was formed in which the Indians of that village either worked in the " Project garden" or gathered and split coconuts for the canteen, both totally controlled by the FUNAI. Hunting and fishing activities were only allowed on Sundays, the Indians did not have family gardens and they disputed the babaçu stands with the regional population.

As a reaction to this system, the village of Mariazinha fragmented in the beginning of the 1990s, most of the families dispersing to other regions of the indigenous area, where they would go back to living exclusively from the subsistence gardens and from hunting and gathering of native fruits - like the other villages.

To the north, in the village of Cocalinho, the lack of assistance from the FUNAI from 1990 to 1994 forced the families who lived there to permit the removal of timber of good quality, tapir beans and jaborandi by outsiders, through the payment of a quantity that would permit them to acquire some industrialized goods for the Indigenous Post. After 1995, with the removal by the FUNAI of the last invaders from that part of the reserve, this type of " leasing" has no longer been done by the Indians.

If the process of occupation of Apinajé territory has been going on since the end of the 18th Century, increasing in intensity in the beginning of the 20th, without a doubt it intensified even more with the implantation of the large development projects in the northern region of Goiás, principally after the construction of the Belém-Brasília and Trans-Amazon highways, which cut through Apinajé territory. Along the latter highway there were even small nuclei of residents where the work camps were situated, during the physical demarcation of the Apinajé area in 1985. These nuclei which lived off the sale of meals, coffee, and cachaça to the highway users, brought numerous problems for the Apinajé, serving as poles for prostitution and the transmission of diseases, besides having devastated the surrounding area in 10 years of occupation, which the Apinajé did not do in more than a hundred years.

Territorial right: incomplete recognition

Between 1975 and 1982 several work groups were established by the FUNAI for the delimitation of the Apinajé área; the process of physical demarcation of the area was initiated in 1979, but this had to be suspended because the Indians did not agree with the limits that were being imposed on them, to the extent they did not incorporate the strip of lands of the Gameleira and Mumbuca rivers.

The Apinajé had part of their lands recognized by the Brazilian state in February, 1985, after they had blocked the Trans-Amazon and had initiated the demarcation of their territory " on their own account" , with the support of Krahô, Xerente, Xavante and several Kayapó warriors.

During this tumultuous process of delimitation and demarcation of the Apinajé area, the MIRAD (the government agency then responsible for the recognition of indigenous areas) finally decreed an area of 142,000 hectares, changing the proposal that had been sent by the FUNAI and removing important areas situated on the Gameleira, Mumbuca and Cruz rivers.

During the struggle for physical demarcation, this area was occupied by 641 invasions, involving a total of approximately 5 thousand people. These occupants received indemnities for their improvements and were intimated to leave the demarcated area only twelve years later, in April of 1997, with resources from the CVRD/FUNAI Accord. The only families who did not receive indemnity were those who resided on the northern border of the area, the region of the Pecobo stream, where the FUNAI had not done a land title survey necessary for calculating the indemnifications.

After the demarcation, still in 1985 the FUNAI sent two work groups to redefine the borders of the Apinajé Indigenous Land, without, however, following up on the process. It was only on April 27, 1994 that the FUNAI signed Decree nº 0429/94, creating the Technical Group for Revising the Apinajé Indigenous Area. The Work Group so established included part of the area claimed by the Apinajé, but the process still awaits the execution of the land-titling survey on the area to be added as a condition for its being sent on its way for decision by the Ministry of Justice.