The various Tukanoan myths of origin refer to a westward upstream migration from Brazil, and Reichel-Dolmatoff believes that there is a ‘kernel of historical truth’ behind these uniform traditions.
Curt Nimuendajú thought that the east Tukanoan tribes invaded from the west, and that the
autochthonous population consisted of the
Makú, assuming that these smaller hunter-gatherers were older than the agriculturalist newcomers. Desultory Spanish contact with the Vaupés region goes back to the 16th century. But historical records show that the Tukano peoples shifted to the remote headwaters of the
Río Negro as a refuge, in flight from the
slave trade and diseases, and forced
relocations introduced by the
Portuguese in the late 18th.century. It was
Alfred Russel Wallace, in travelling up the Vaupés river in 1850 who first took note of Indians like the Barasana and their
dialects. and the rites of their Yurupary
cult. According to his account, traders were already active in the area.
Catholic and
Protestant missionaries entered the area in the last decades of the 19th century. One major reaction to this
evangelisation in the Vaupés, initiated by Venancio Aniseto Kamiko, was to create a wave of
messianic cults among the tribes. Missionaries were convinced that the central cult of Yurupary, their
culture hero, was the work of the
Devil, though this was a series of rituals rather than a divinity. The result was widespread damage to the native culture. as ceremonial houses were burnt, ritual ornaments destroyed, and secret masks displayed to the tribe's women and children, who were previously
forbidden to look at them.
Messianic shamanism, strongly connected with jaguar shamanism, declined further with the establishment of
Catholic missions in the first decades of the 20th century. The German traveller
Theodor Koch-Grünberg spent two years at the turn of the century (1903–05) travelling throughout the region and provided a classic account of the Indians’ material culture and languages, which long remained the authoritative source for information of these tribes. Rubber-gatherers from the beginning of the 20th century began to aggressively exploit the area, as they did again the
World War II when the urgency of improved rubber supplies led to a
rubber boom in the area. Their violent presence caused considerable upheaval and suffering, finally driving the Indians, after fierce resistance, into the less accessible backwaters. Population decline, as a result, has been a marked feature of the past one hundred and fifty years, The earliest professional ethnological
fieldwork was done by
Irving Goldman in 1939-40 among the Cubeo Indians. Postwar missionary work, colonizing movements, and the activities of the linguists attached to Christian proselytisation still engage, according to Stephen Hugh-Jones, in the ‘criminal folly’ of
ethnocide by their programmatic hostility to traditional religion ==Economy==