While on one hand this facilitates their access to medical assistance and the implementation of rural schooling, on the other hand it presents some almost insoluble problems. The first of these is dietary in kind. As we saw, the hunters of a village of 25 inhabitants hunt within a radius of seven to ten kilometres surrounding the village. If the population of the village increases, the radius for the hunters' activities also increases. Instead of trekking four hours a day, they are forced to trek six hours or more so as to encounter sufficient game to feed their family members. Over time, this becomes impractical, especially for the hunters in the mission-villages: they would have to journey for a number of days in order to maintain a reasonable level of game in supply. As a result, these villages experience periodic food shortages. To solve this problem, the missionaries encourage the creation of pastureland and donate cattle. But as well as failing to produce enough meat to substitute hunting, cattle breeding reinforces the spatial concentration and sedentarization of these Indians. Yet, as we have seen, the Maku resolve their internal conflicts by dispersing into various villages and encampments. In the mission-villages, though, they are reluctant to abandon the cattle. So they stay at the site, despite the disputes. Consequently, conflicts tend to be much more frequent and violent, some resulting in deaths. Nowadays, the missionaries recognize that the mission-villages "are not such a good thing for these Indians." But they confront a dilemma: the São Gabriel da Cachoeira municipal council will not agree to the maintenance of rural schools in villages with less than 15 children - and there are not 15 children of school age in the villages of traditional size.

Another inconvenience of the mission-villages is the difficulty gathering the thatching to cover the houses (made from caranã palm). A mission-village exhausts the nearby palm stands in a short amount of time. In response, the missionaries and the municipal council have distributed sheets of zinc, which severely increase the heat inside the houses. In the rainy season, this heat contrasts strongly with the cold at night. The large thermal variation encourages and aggravates respiratory diseases, whose spread is also increased by the spatial concentration itself. So while on one hand the mission-villages are more accessible to medical assistance, on the other hand they propagate epidemics and as a result require more medical assistance than the traditional villages.

According to the data from Saúde Sem Limites, an NGO that has been working among the Maku of the Uaupés, the population's health situation is precarious, with a high incidence of tuberculosis, trachoma and various parasitic infections (Cf. Athias, 1995). In the Apapóris region, the Maku are often victims of seasonal outbreaks of malaria, since, in contrast to the Negro river region, malaria is endemic in this region (Cf. Pozzobon, 1997c). In the vicinity of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, the Maku - more specifically the Duw - suffer from alcoholism, as well as being exposed to constant malnutrition due to the deterioration of the forest close to the urban perimeter. These peoples are also the most sought out by regatões (Amazonian river traders, who pay in merchandise for the native production of lianas, rubber, piassava palm etc.). As ever, these traders strive to keep the Indians in eternal debt, distributing cachaça rum to ensure their domination and exploitation.

The missionary experiments aiming to solve the health problems of the Maku have proven to be fruitless, since most of the time they amount to encouraging the settlement of local groups in permanent bases, whereas previously they had wandered in various dispersed points of the interfluvial territory. As is well know, spatial concentration not only increases the likelihood of malnutrition, due to the decreased capacity of the immediate environment to provide resources, it also facilitates epidemics. As a result, medical assistance based on the sedentarization of the Maku only worsened the problems it was supposed to solve.

Further still, work in the mission-village swiddens is extremely arduous. Given the over-exploitation of the clearings and the rapid exhaustion of the soil, the swiddens are located ever more distantly. This forces the woman to undertake long journeys on trails passing through the middle of the forest, carrying baskets with 30 or 40 kilos of manioc, something the Tukano women do not have to do: they transport the tubers in canoes, since their swiddens are usually located by the shores of rivers and navigable creeks.

Finally, there is a very important political aspect involved in the sedentarization and spatial concentration of the Maku. As mentioned earlier, the indigenous territories in the Negro river region were recently demarcated and ratified. The large interfluvial spaces within this set of adjacent lands is justified by the presence of the Maku. For this reason, they constitute a key element in the strategies for patrolling and protecting these interior spaces. There are no 'demographic vacuums' in the interfluvial territories, but areas cyclically used by the Maku. But the increase in the sedentarization process and the spatial concentration of these Indians risks reinforcing the 'demographic vacuums' thesis so dear to those planning a non-indigenous fate for the area, such as the installation of 'agricultural colonies' and 'national forests', in accord with the desires of the Calha Norte Project.

The respect for their traditional patterns of spatial occupation certainly hinders the task of providing the Maku with literacy in their own language, as well as their access to medical assistance, both rights guaranteed in the 1988 Constitution. But this difficulty should be seen as a challenge, not an obstruction, since the same Constitution prescribes that the customs of each indigenous people must be respected. As a people who have been considerably isolated in terms of contact and have thus had little experience in terms of indigenous movements, it is necessary to support them. It is necessary for the missionaries, the municipal council, FUNAI, the river Indians, indigenous organizations and the NGOs working in the area to develop, alongside the Maku, an educational and healthcare program that is adapted to their customs, with mobile health units and itinerant schools.