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In 1994, after being appointed by the Brazilian Anthropology Association, I fulfilled a request from FUNAI to direct the new studies on the definition of the Cachoeira Seca do Iriri indigenous area, where the subgroup contacted in 1987 had its village. Despite the enormous effort and involvement from the Indians themselves and entities and representatives of settlers and squatters, which allowed the construction of an agreed and relatively consensual proposal for defining the limits of the area, the process for regularizing the area was not completed - for unknown but to my mind dubious reasons.

The other problem is the rapid and very often disruptive way in which the Indians' interactions with the thousands of surrounding settlers are taking place. Due to their small population, the relatively rapid demographic growth and the increase in the influence of Portuguese in daily life, Arara sociocultural reproduction may already be fairly compromised.

Between 1987 and 1992 - even among the younger men and the women, who have a more continuous interaction with the staff of the FUNAI post - there were few people who spoke Portuguese in a more fluent fashion. From this time onwards, with the progressive introduction of a school and teachers contracted by the Xingu Prelature, children and adolescents started to use Portuguese more intensively, to the point of substituting the native language when speaking among themselves. But in 1994, the older adult Indians were still, with a few exceptions, almost completely monolingual.

Aggravating the situation, a number of adult men, especially those who moved to the surveillance post, began to look to the settlers - neighbours on that border of the area - as a means of accessing the material goods that FUNAI no longer supplied: in trade, the Arara have very often abandoned their own activities to work for the settlers. This ever more constant interaction has also increased the influence of Protestant churches - who already insinuated themselves into the community some time ago via the surreptitious presence of a missionary doubling as a linguist among the Indians of the surveillance post. These events have started to show other deleterious effects, such as the excessive and decontextualized consumption of alcoholic drinks, which is foreign to Arara traditions but common among the settlers in the region. How long all this will remain limited to the section of the population who, induced to live at the surveillance post, is closer and subject to these perverting influences is something that for now remains impossible to tell. But the future reality of the Arara will certainly depend on their capacity to interact without losing the basic conditions for their own reproduction and maintaining the central aspects of their way of life and their view of the world.