Most of the contact the indigenous peoples have had with the mainstream society has been through FUNAI researchers, missionaries, military men, gold miners and farmers, who grow rice in the damp plains.

After being identified as an Indian homeland by FUNAI, it was mapped during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration but was only accepted formally by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2005.

[5] Concerns about the reserve started back in the 1970s, when Brazilian indigenist Orlando Villas-Boas gave a now-famous interview in which he said that the creation of Indian reserves close to border areas was a risk to the integrity of the Brazilian territory and that the action of missionaries in Brazil sought to build up national conscience among the most numerous indigenous peoples, like the Macuxi and the Yanomami, with the covert goal of establishing independent or semi-independent national entities and fragmenting the control of the Amazon jungle.

[9] On 15 April 2005 the area was completely assigned to Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI: National Indian Foundation) through the "dual affectation" legal device create by the federal government with recognition of the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Territory.

[2] Under the decree of 15 April 2005 the boundaries of the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Territory were ratified and Monte Roraima National Park was made Union public property with the roles of both maintaining the constitutional rights of the Indians and conserving the environment.

Non-indigenous rice farmers had protested their deportation from the TI, arguing that the reserve undermined Brazil's national integrity and the state's economic development, and proposing that it be broken up.