The poverty of the predominant scrubland, added to the waterfalls and rapids found along the rivers, was one of the obstacles to the expanding colonial fronts of the Portuguese and Spanish, who were already disputing the region in the 17th century, setting up military outposts at some points on the Negro river, from where captured natives were taken 'down-river' to the emerging urban centres (Barcelos, Manaus and Belém). From the 18th century onwards, these 'transferrals' were intensified, so that even the Maku in their secluded interfluvial territories had some of their own kind imprisoned as slaves. However, analysis of the colonial documents confirms that among those indigenous peoples in the region, they were the least affected by the practice of 'transferral' or by the violence arising from the rubber boom at the end of the following century. In fact, the rubber boom was possibly one of the motives for the adoption of agricultural practices by the Maku: taking refuge in the interfluvial lands in order to escape the imprisonment practised by the rubber tappers, the Tukano began to live in closer proximity with the Maku, teaching them the cultivation of manioc, as well as a series of items from their material and spiritual culture, which we shall discuss later.

In 1914, in the middle of the period of economic stagnation resulting from the collapse of the rubber trade, the Salesian missionaries entered the scene, a Catholic order dedicated to education. They obtained the adhesion of all the Indians bordering the rivers on the Brazilian side - however, they encountered strong resistance from the Maku, who refused to send their children to the boarding schools at the mission centres. In the 1970s, the Salesians experimented with a few exclusively Maku mission villages (see below). Gold mining - which developed in the region between the middle of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s, a period when the indigenous movement succeeded in expulsing the invaders with the support of the Public Ministry and the force of the Federal Police - had little effect on the Maku, since it was mostly practised on land close to the rivers. The only gold mine on terra firma, in the extreme south of the Upper Negro River IT, had already been abandoned by 1986 by the mining company Paranapanema, due to its low productivity; with the intensification of the indigenous movement in the 1990s, gold became exploited exclusively by Indians.