Their reputation for fierceness and the difficult terrain in which they live prevented them from being incorporated into Peruvian national society until the late 1950s—and later still in some parts of their territory.

Road construction and the establishment of bilingual schools and health posts has led to a more clustered settlement pattern and in some cases the appearance of densely populated hamlets.

The towns for which there exists a pattern of nucleate population are called "yáakat" in their native language, and do not have streets, footpaths, or squares, but rather are constituted of houses of traditional construction.

Among the Awajún there is a traditional institution of mutual aid known in their language as ipáamamu, which can be seen in action primarily when they are constructing housing for young couples, clearing fields and, with less frequency, sowing yuca and peanuts.

Such relocations have become rarer as Awajún find their range of movement increasingly confined to titled community lands, which in some cases are now surrounded by the farms and villages of non-indigenous colonists.

Major species of animals that are hunted by the Aguaruna include the sajino, the huangana, the Brazilian tapir (sachavaca), the little red brocket, the ocelot and the otorongo (jaguar).

Species which are less commonly hunted include the majaz, the ronsoco, the achuni, the añuje, the carachupa, the otter, diverse classes of monkeys and birds.

They extract leche caspi and gather the honey of wild bees, edible worms (suris), beetles, medicinal plants and lianas.

As agricultural instruments, they use the traditional wái (a stick with a sharp end, made from the wood of the pijuayo palm tree), along with the axe, the machete and the shovel.

In accordance with the ethnic characteristics of the majority, some anthropologists suppose that they came down the Andes centuries ago and adapted themselves to the geographical conditions of the region.

Some communities now cultivate rice, coffee, cocoa and bananas for sale, either in local markets or for transport to coastal cities like Chiclayo.

In the later half of the 20th century, the arrival of Protestant and Jesuit missionaries, the building of roads, and the construction of an oil pipeline created substantial tension between the Aguaruna people, poor agricultural colonists, state agencies, and corporations.

In the mid-1990s Aguaruna were involved in negotiating a novel bioprospecting agreement with a US-based pharmaceutical multinational, G.D. Searle & Company (then part of Monsanto), and a group of ethnobotanists from Washington University in St. Louis.

The project involved a controversy over violations of the Aguarunas' rights over their genetic and cultural resources and to an equitable share in the potential profits derived from pharmaceuticals based on their traditional knowledge of medicinal plants.

As Tim Cahill wrote in his Outside magazine account of a father's search for closure, "A Darkness on the River", "On the evening of January 18, 1995", just before the outbreak of the border war with neighboring Ecuador, "two 26-year-old Americans, Josh Silver and Patchen Miller, floated down the Marañón on a large balsa-wood raft they had built several days earlier.

After that, Washington University entered into negotiations with OCCAAM as well as their national representative organization the Confederación de Nacionalidades Amazónicas del Perú (CONAP).

The "know-how license" concept as applied to indigenous peoples' knowledge is a legal first, according to Professor Charles McManis of Washington University School of Law.

Professor McManis worked for the same university profiting from the arrangement and, in any event, the license earned nobody any money or fame except the SPDA advisor.