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A myth telling of the origin of the terrestrial world explains the pattern of territorial dispersion which the Arara historically maintained in the Tapajós-Tocantins interfluvial region.

Originating in a celestial cataclysm caused by an enormous fight between kin, the terrestrial world was the setting for a political accord between those who, being those responsible for the inaugural tragedy, were condemned to live on the ground. The division into small subgroups - independent and autonomous, but integrated by a network of intercommunity exchanges, above all during the hunt and festival seasons - was established as a kind of pact to ensure that the conflicts that brought about terrestrial life were never repeated. The ethnonym used by the people also relates to the origin myth: Ukarãngmã - almost literally 'people of the red macaws' - is their name for themselves, in a reference to the participation of these parrots soon after the tragedy that gave rise to the terrestrial world. In the myth, it was the red macaws who tried to carry back many of those who had fallen from the skies.

Speakers of a Carib language, the Arara belong to the same dialectical sub-family - also called Arara - that includes the Apiacá of the Tocantins (extinct), the Yaruma (extinct) and the Ikpeng, today living in the Xingu Indigenous Park, peoples who lived dispersed over a wide territory encompassing the entire upper and middle Xingu valley and the Iriri river. In geographical terms, the indigenous peoples of this Arara sub-family occupied an intermediary geographical position in relation to the larger demographic concentrations of Carib language speakers found in the massif of the Guyanas and the headwaters of the upper Xingu river.

Nonetheless, the region of the Ronuro, Batovi, Culiseu and Culuene rivers (precisely the headwaters of the Xingu, today an area of the Indigenous Park of the same name) is the most probable place for the original dispersion of the peoples from this dialectical sub-family. Their relocation into the Xingu basin seems to have coincided with a migration of the Kayapó, who left the savannah areas close to the Araguaia river in the middle of the 19th century and reached the middle Xingu sometime at the start of the 20th century.

The entire region between the Tapajós and the Tocantins (and particularly the Xingu valley) seems to have been a zone of continual movement of indigenous groups, until the start of the second quarter of the 20th century, when migrating populations coming from the Brazilian north-east began to alter the demographic dynamic of the region, affecting the indigenous populations already installed there.

Arara mythic narratives indicate the right shores of the Xingu as the place where everything began: the formation of the current world, the generation of the Arara people, the dispersion of subgroups and the beginning of the conflicts with 'traditional enemies. Historical data confirm the Arara's movement between the two shores of the middle Xingu river as far as the fixation on its left shore, close to the Iriri river, after crossing the Xingu someway below the 'Big Bend,' around the middle of the 19th century. Both historical information - such as the references to conflicts with hunters and public works employees - and the memory of older Arara people indicate the region near to Altamira, someway below the mouth of the Iriri river, as the area with the highest concentration of Arara subgroup settlements in the past.

Occupying the watershed region between west of the Xingu, east of the Tapajós and south of the lower Amazon since the middle of the 19th century, the Arara had access to the natural resources found both in the Xingu basin and the smaller affluents running into the Amazon.

In his expedition to the Xingu in 1896, the voyager Henri Coudreau mentioned the existence of 'wild Arara' - subgroups then without any contact with Whites - to the left of the Xingu, in the region between the Curuá river (to the left of the upper Iriri river) "to within a close distance of the Amazon." A strategic site with a profusion of possibilities for ecological adaptation and optimization of the use of the numerous resources that typify the Xingu and Amazon river basins, the watershed allowed each local group, depending on its particular location, subtle differences in terms of its use pattern of raw materials unequally distributed across the territory (bamboo stems for arrows, straw for braids and baskets, and the higher or lower occurrence of inajá palms for extracting a typical drink, etc). At the same time, the watershed provided the Arara access to hunting territories of various kinds, a flexibility that allowed them to benefit more productively from the differences between the dry and rainy seasons during the year.