::01	The activities of the missionaries resumed in 1883 with the arrival of Franciscans on the  Uaupés. The Indians were obliged to set aside one day a week for building the houses of the religious and military authorities, the church and the prison. The Franciscans attempted to eradicate the activities of the local shamans and exercise control over the river merchants, who could only conduct commerce with the Indians with their authorization. One of these Franciscans, Friar Illuminato Coppi, is described in the historical sources as a violent man, intolerant, who didn’t hesitate to ridicule the indigenous customs and beliefs. On several occasions, he exposed the sacred masks and musical instruments to the women and children – who are prohibited, on pain of death, from seeing them. His last provocation, which took place on October 28th, 1883 in Ipanoré, led to the revolt of the Indians of the village and the expulsion of the Franciscan missionaries. After the missionaries had left, the Indians went back to their longhouses. Missionary activities in the region only started up again in 1914, with the creation of the Apostolic Prefecture of the Rio Negro in São Gabriel da Cachoeira and the arrival of the Salesians. The congregation of Dom Bosco demonstrated that it was very well organized, with clear objectives and strategies and personnel quite willing and prepared for the “difficulties of this apostolic mission". The first decades of their presence in the region were marked by major upheaval. No doubt, it meant a reduction of the abuses by the rubber bosses who predominated until then. But, on the other hand, the Salesians also took advantage of the state of submission and fear in which they found these people to implement their supposedly “civilizing” project. Demonstrating a deep disdain for the forms of organization and thought of the Indians, they sought from the beginning to destroy the cultural manifestations of these peoples. This attitude in relation to indigenous culture is easily observable in the various publications of the Salesians.
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The Salesians considered that they would only succeed in penetrating the consciousness of the adults and elders by way of the children, after these had been trained through a severe, Christian education. In this way, the life of the children at the Mission was marked by extreme rigour and discipline: the times for all daily activities were rigidly set and had to be obeyed, the separation of the sexes was absolute, the use of indigenous languages was expressly prohibited, even for the newcomers who didn’t speak a word of Portuguese. The Salesians also greatly insisted, and ended up succeeding, in convincing the Indians to abandon their longhouses and to settle in villages comprised of separate houses for each family, under the pretexts that the longhouses were not healthy places and encouraged sexual promiscuity. They also discouraged the Indians from practicing the male initiation rituals (rituals of “Jurupary”). They waged defamatory campaigns ridiculing the activities of the local shamans, they prohibited the consumption of hallucinogenics, they removed cerimonial adornments and musical instruments from the indigenous longhouses.

Yet, with their permanent installation on the upper Rio Negro, and due to the fact that they created, at that time, the only infra-structure of assistance to the Indians, the Salesian missions little by little increased their activities, coming to assume, for awhile, control over health, education, and commerce in the region. They helped to control the situation of exploitation of the Indians, although they had minimal effects on the Içana, where they only established a mission in the 1950s.

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The year 1970 was an important mark in the recent history of the Brazilian Amazon. The federal government, then controlled by the military, publicly announced the National Integration Plan (PIN), a program to develop the infra-structure for the purpose of geopolitically integrating the region with the rest of the country, which also had effects in the region of the Upper Rio Negro.

Between 1972 and 1975  the first effects of the Program appeared, with the installation of FUNAI posts and the arrival of military personnel from the Engineering and Construction Battalion and workers from companies contracted for the construction of highway BR-307 (connection between São Gabriel and Cucuí) and of a stretch of the Northern Perimeter Highway (BR-210), today abandoned. In 1979, with the cutback in federal funds, the Salesians decided to close the boarding-school system. The first school to be closed was the male boarding-school at the mission headquarters in São Gabriel da Cachoeira. In 1984, a report of the Salesian mission registered 501 students still in the school. Between 1985 and 1987 the boarding schools of Iauareté, Taracuá, Pari-Cachoeira and Assunção of the Içana were closed, as was the female boarding-school in São Gabriel.

In 1983, gold was discovered in the Traíra mountains by Tukano Indians of the Tiquié, which triggered a “gold fever” that spread to several points in the region for more than a decade, attracting Indians and initially gold-panners from other parts of the country and inhabitants of São Gabriel and, later, mining companies, who invaded the Traíra mountains and the region of the upper Içana.

::08	The impacts of these changes were seen in the rapid growth of the population of the city of São Gabriel da Cachoeira which doubled in size, totalling some 4,500 inhabitants, according to estimates made in August, 1985. The "swelling" of São Gabriel was due, in part, to