In the Uaçá region, four ethnic groups live together: besides the Palikur, there are the Karipuna groups, who live mostly on the banks of the Curipi River; the Galibi-Marworno, located in a single village on the left bank of the Uaçá River; and the Galibi-Kaliña, a group that consists of but one family, who migrated to Brazil in the 1950s, from Mana, in French Guiana, to the right bank of the Oiapoque River.

Trade relations maintained with several of the indigenous societies of the region date from ancient times, but actually communication among them has become ever more restricted to the General Assemblies of the Indigenous Peoples of the Uaçá or to the celebrations on “Indian Day". The participation of the Palikur in these assemblies can be described as timid, for, despite the fact that they speak patois, it seems like they don’t feel at ease in speaking in public in this language. One thus observes a big difference in comparison with the internal meetings of the Palikur in which orators (men) are used to speaking at length.

It is worth noting that the Palikur invariably complain of not being heard and not having their demands met. And they refuse on purpose to participate in the network of sociability engendered by the assemblies. The clearest instance of this refusal occurs on the last day of the assembly, on the night of the closing festival, when only those who have “deviated from the faith" get together with the Karipuna, Galibi-Marworno and Galibi-Kaliña to dance and drink the whole night.

Yet, if a situation requires the joint action of all the indigenous peoples of the region, the Palikur actively participate together with the others. Thus, at the end of April, 1998, the Indians united to prevent a new administrator of FUNAI – ADR/Oiapoque from taking office. For nearly 15 days, the headquarters of the administration was seized and surrounded, and it was left to the Palikur to keep watch, armed with bows and arrows, until the signal was given to leave. The same thing happens at the times of cleaning the demarcation line of the Indigenous Land, when groups of men go to the middle of the woods for three to four days to clean the demarcation strip.

Over the past three years, the Palikur have intensified another type of intercommunity and interethnic communication: the evangelization of other indigenous peoples. The Palikur missionaries began evangelizing in the mid-1980s, when they introduced Pentecostalism among the Palikur of French Guiana. More recently, at the turn of the century, the evangelical missionary and his following of about twenty people, announcing the imminent “end of time" reactivated their visits to the villages of their people which had still not been evangelized, and also their action among the Catholic Karipuna of the village of Santa Isabel.