[3] Since the Piaroa (Huottüja or De'aruhua) were discovered by missionaries and explorers around 1780[4] they have been an autonomous society with many individual small self-governed villages scattered over a very wide area.

[5] In recent years populations living within the traditional territory began to reclaim their cultural heritage and sovereignty by designating official leaders, establishing an admiralty court (tribunal), creating laws that protect their environment, and mapping their villages, rivers, creeks, trails, cemeteries, mountains, valleys, monuments, protected areas, community centers, and conucos (familiar garden patches) in their own language and in Spanish.

In 2020, Piaroa living on the Catañiapo River successfully and peacefully removed over 200 armed Colombian non-state actors and called an assembly of indigenous jurisdiction officials.

[13] Violent conflict erupted between the Piaroa and the Wæñæpi of the Upper Suapure and Guaviarito regions, with both tribes fighting to control the clay pits of the Guanay valley.

The Huottüja were influenced by religion as early as the late 1700s with the mission in San Fernando de Atabapo, in the 1940s by the Salesians and Jesuits, then by missionaries from the Protestant Evangelical faiths including Baptist and Presbyterian.

A resurgence of public interest in Piaroa shamanism and entheogenic plant use is providing positive reinforcement for ayahuasca (yagé) and yopo tourism among the De'aruhua communities.

Many Piaroa today acknowledge that the influence of the church, monarchy, politics, and violations of their human rights by the state which began in the middle of the eighteenth century have all distorted their indigenous cosmovision as a people.

From the 1990 until 2010 ecotourism became a major economic factor among the Piaroa which included students, academic institutions, diplomatic officials, missionaries, non-governmental organizations, researchers and a few perpetual travellers which touched their communities.

[15][16] Because the Piaroa language is a phonetic one, mostly unwritten until the 1930s and phonetically incompatible with Spanish or English sounds, their official alphabet was based on biblical translations developed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) in the 1950s, the Huottüja themselves have since developed their own alphabet based on the accepted Latin Language codes ISO 639-3 PID guidelines of the institute, an elementary dictionary and a number of grade school curriculum readers.