The Yawanawa people’s first contact with the non-indigenous world happened around the 19th century. It was an intense period of many conflicts with the rubber barons and missionaries who invaded their lands and tried to forbid the Yawanawa language, culture, and spirituality. In the 1980s, chief Biraci Nixiwaka Brazil led his people in the fight for the recognition of their native territories, and the Yawanawa became the first indigenous people to obtain the official rights to their lands in the state of Acre.
The Yawanawa have since then reclaimed their sacred medicines, rituals, song and dance, festivals, games, traditional body painting and adornment, artwork, and food, in a profound journey of cultural revival.