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Barbosa Rodrigues traveled through various villages near the indigenous territory with the intention of enlisting guides and collecting data and reports about the Waimiri Atroari. He referred to them as the Crichanás, claiming that they were the ethnic group he encountered during the time of his expeditions, but that the “terrible and treacherous” natives who used to live in the region no longer existed. The rationale for this new denomination was that he wanted to create a new image of the indigenous people in this region. This would facilitate his mission of pacification and thereby promote friendlier contacts between Indians and non-Indians, whose relations at the time were extremely hostile.

The Waimiri Atroari witnessed the invasion of their territory by outsiders seeking to exploit various kinds of natural resources (animal pelts, Brazil nuts, rubber, rosewood, and so on). The Indians armed themselves with bows and arrows to repel these invaders. Word of the Waimiri Atroari's fearlessness reached the capital of the Amazonas province, and the government organized military expeditions to retaliate against the entire indigenous population. According to reports and documents of the era, the Waimiri Atroari's attempts to repulse invaders from their lands cost them many more lives than those lost by non-Indians.

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After the turn of the century (1911), Alípio Bandeira, a representative of the Indian Protection Service (SPI, the Brazilian bureau of Indian affairs until 1967), traveled through the region surrounding the Rio Jauaperi in search of this people, who were now known as the Uaimirys. He found basically the same state of hostility, taking into account differences of scale and historical conditions, between indigenous and non-indigenous populations. In 1912, Alípio Bandeira established the first Indian attraction station on the Rio Jauaperi. Soon afterwards, he made his first friendly contacts with the Waimiri Atroari. From this time on, SPI coordinated the indigenist services and policies in the region – at least theoretically, since this government agency had little autonomy for enforcing the indigenist policies of the era.

During this period, the economy of the state government was based on extractivist activities. This meant that the indigenous population was considered an inconvenience to Brazilians who gathered natural medicinals and other wild plants and who viewed native lands as a huge storehouse of such resources. The government encouraged gatherers to invade areas occupied by native peoples. Denunciations of such invasions were treated as slander against the gatherers that was spread by people who wanted to prevent the growth of the state economy. Repeating scenes from the end of the prior century, the Waimiri Atroari reacted against the invasions of their territorial space by attacking and killing non-Indians, and the government organized more reprisals to avenge the deaths and punish their authors. The retaliations against the Indians were always disproportionate. They were unequal battles, first, in terms of weapons, one side using firearms, the other, bows and arrows. Furthermore, three hundred Brazilians were arrayed against a much smaller number of Indians, according to the reports of casualties on both sides. These were unjust wars in which one side attacked while the other defended itself. Given their reduced number of combatants, the Waimiri Atroari found themselves in the position of defending their territory, their honor, and their communities. Entire villages were decimated in surprise attacks, but even so, Indian warriors fought with supreme skill. Hence the reputation of the Waimiri Atroari as a fearless, warlike, wild, and remote people continued to grow, leading to myths about their social character.

In the late 1960s, the governments of Amazonas state and Roraima territory initiated construction of an overland highway between the cities of Manaus and Caracaraí. Knowing the history of conflicts between the Waimiri Atroari and Brazilians, the Amazonas Department of Transportation (DER-AM) asked the Indian Protection Service (SPI) to pacify the native people in the shortest time possible, to avoid possible confrontations with highway construction workers. The government was also in a hurry because of national and international protests against its plans to build the highway straight through the middle of Waimiri Atroari territory.

Shortly after scandals led to the termination of SPI, its successor, the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), intensified contact activities through the Waimiri Atroari Attraction Campaign. The expeditionist Gilberto Pinto Figueiredo was put in charge of leading the pacification efforts. He conducted the contacts according to FUNAI's indigenist policies. He visited the indigenous villages, communicated with the residents through gestures, and traded “presents” (metal pots, knives, axes, machetes, utensils, and clothing) for objects made by the Waimiri Atroari. He created several attraction stations in strategic places for attaining his objective of attracting the Indians to locations distant from the highway. But DER-AM, the state agency responsible for work on the Manaus/Caracaraí road, considered the frontiersman's efforts to be too slow-paced. Due to pressures from Federal and state politicians, DER-AM wanted to conclude the construction project quickly, so it asked FUNAI to replace Figueiredo.

After Figueiredo was removed, the Italian priest Giovanni Calleri, from the Roraima church parish, assumed responsibility for the attraction of the Waimiri Atroari. The Calleri expedition consisted of eight men and two women. This was the first time that women participated in this type of work; their presence was supposed to lend a “normal,” family-like character to the expedition.

Their strategy was to follow river courses, which the priest viewed as neutral territory respected by the Indians. Father Calleri thought contacts would be easier with villages that were farther away from the crews of highway workers, reasoning that their residents “had not yet witnessed the arrival of white people.” However, his plans for beginning activities via the Rio Alalaú, where the most remote villages were located, were changed when it became necessary to placate the conflicts between the Waimiri Atroari and the workers. Calleri modified the trajectory of the expedition by initiating contacts along the Rio Santo Antonio do Abonari. The team spent five days in native territory and established contact with the residents of one community. However, at the end of the fifth day, the Indians killed almost all of the team members, of whom only one woodsman survived.

With the extermination of Father Calleri's team, Gilberto Pinto Figueiredo was reassigned to the task. The responsibility for building the highway was transferred from the state-level DER-AM to the National Department of Transportation (DNER), which expanded the initial project into a Federal highway, BR-174, between Manaus and Boa Vista. DNER assigned the Brazilian Army the mission of coordinating and conducting the work, even though the forces had no experience in civil construction projects. Thus, the highway work was resumed by the 60^th Battalion of Engineering and Construction (60 BEC) of the 20^th Corps of Engineering and Construction.

The relations between members of FUNAI and the Army were tense during the construction period. On the one hand, FUNAI defined norms of conduct within native territory for all those involved in highway work; on the other hand, the army violated these norms and conducted engineering operations according to its own criteria.

The urgency to bring the construction project to a close intensified the divergence between the two government institutions and undermined the indigenist activities that had been elaborated so far. Their disagreements led to a chain of events that incited the Indians to kill Figueiredo and everyone else at the attraction station in 1974. The 60^th Battalion intensified its work and finished the highway, fulfilling the mandates of the Federal and state governments. To ensure traffic flow and guarantee safe passage of passengers against attacks by the Waimiri Atroari along the stretch of the highway that went through indigenous territory, the 60^th Battalion installed sentry posts to control the entry and exit of vehicles across the northern and southern boundaries of the reservation.

The Waimiri Atroari Indigenous Reservation was created in 1971. However, the Federal government's plans for developing the Amazon region continued to impinge on their territory. During the 1970s, photographs from the Amazon Radar Project (RADAM) revealed cassiterite deposits lying within their reservation. In the early 1980s, the Paranapanema company expressed interest in exploiting these deposits. With the help of FUNAI and the National Department of Mineral Production (part of the Ministry of Mines and Energy), the company filed a lawsuit that led to the dissolution of the Waimiri Atroari Indigenous Reservation, demoting it to a Temporary Restricted Area for the Attraction and Pacification of the Waimiri Atroari Indians in 1981. This new presidential decree excluded the mineral deposits from the indigenous territory. Later in the 1980s, another massive project impinged on Waimiri Atroari lands, the construction of the Balbina hydroelectric project by Eletronorte, creating a lake that flooded 30,000 hectares of their territory.