Since it was founded, two hundred years ago, the present settlement of the Fulni-ô has been linked to the history of the town of Águas Belas and its non-Indian inhabitants.

According to tradition, it was a white man, João Rodrigues Cardoso, who first settled in the area and gave origin to the village of Ipanema, which later would become the town of Águas Belas. Mario Melo (1929) says that this man, with the help of the Fulni-ô, erected the chapel of Nossa Senhora da Conceição (Our Lady of Conception), also obtaining from the government the appointment of his friend Lourenço Bezerra Cavalcanti for director of the aldeados, a post created in 1757.

The 1850 Imperial Land Law (Lei Imperial de Terras) gave to the Provinces the possession over extinct Indian aldeamentos. As a result, the Provinces of Northeastern Brazil were in a hurry to declare extinct the Indians who lived in their aldeamentos. It was for this reason that, on May 4, 1875 the president of the Province of Pernambuco considered extinct several aldeamentos, among them Ipanema or Águas Belas.

With the official extinction of the aldeamentos, the “civilized”, anxious to expand their properties, invested against the Fulni-ô, pushing them into the caatinga (the semi-arid interior of Northeastern Brazil) and taking their cultivated lands, thus illegally taking possession of lands that rightfully belonged to the Indians.

Yet it is possible that the Fulni-ô were actually luckier than other indigenous groups, because the Provincial government, in the face of the seizure of their lands by “civilized” settlers, came to their rescue and determined the demarcation of the lands that had been previously given to the Fulni-ô. Thus in that same year of 1875 the area was demarcated and given to the Fulni-ô (Cerqueira Vianna, 1966; Pinto, 1956; Melo, 1929). This demarcation respected the donation previously made to the chapel of Nossa Senhora da Conceição, whose surface was 759,664 square meters (Pinto. 1956:14).

This intervention of the provincial government on behalf of the Indians, although useful in slowing down the advance of the “civilized” population, did not stop it altogether, and a few years later the Indians were once again pressed to depart from lands that rightfully belonged to them. Thus in 1886 the local Câmara de Vereadores (City Council) considered the demarcation irregular and asked the government to legalize the lands occupied by posseiros (illegal “white” occupants).

So in the 20th Century the Fulni-ô continued their old struggle for land. In 1904, with the change in the government, the “civilized”, encouraged by the new laws established by the Republican regime, were looking for new ways (or, more precisely, new legal ways) to seize Indian property. In 1908, the village lands were leased to a certain Nicolau Cavalcanti de Siqueira for a 6-year period, in the end of which they were to revert back to public control (Vasconcelos 1962:36; Pinto, 1956:16).

However, when the contract end, the mayor of Águas Belas at the time, Cezar Montezuma de Oliveira, invited all those who lived on the lands to request their respective lease. But because this did not happen the lands were given back to the Fulni-ô.

In 1928 the area was subdivided by the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, to which the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios – National Service for the Indians, then the official federal organ for Indian policy – (SPI) into 400 lots of 550x550 meters (30.25 hectares), plus 27 smaller lots with irregular perimeters. On May 14, 1929 the Fulni-ô were given temporary individual titles to the lands they owned. But although at that time each Fulni-ô family received a lot, today some of them are landless.