Yaminahua woman wearing traditional adornments embellished with modern additions, including colorful beads on the necklace and fragrant basil in the armbands.
Though today they have changed a great deal due to Western contact, the Yaminahua still maintain aspects of their adaptable, nomadic, lifestyle, as well as their great love of makeup, colorful clothes and perfumes.

Though today Manu is seen by the world as a "Living Eden", a last refuge of pristine nature, Manu has in fact long since lost its innocence. At the turn of the century, Manu was the hub of one of the most lucrative rubber extraction empires on the continent. With the help of Piro and Ashaninka Indians, the rubber baron Fitgerald (or "Fitzcarraldo") crossed a divide between the Upper Mishagua (an affluent of the Urubamba) and Upper Manu (an affluent of the Madre de Dios) rivers. This opened up the Madre de Dios region to rubber tapping, which had before been inaccessible due to large rapids and waterfalls in Bolivia.

The presence of rubber tappers in the Manu levied a heavy toll on the native peoples of the region. Acculturated natives of many tribes (Piro, Ashaninka, Shipibo, Amahuaca, Machiguenga) were hired to capture slaves among the more isolated tribes. Sometimes, these slave runners would capture and sell members of their own ethnic group. Native slaves who tried to escape slavery were sometimes brutally punished or killed. Epidemics of measles, malaria, influenza and tuberculosis ravaged native communities. Ethnographic notes taken by the Harvard anthropologist William Farabee in the Upper Manu in the first decade of the 1900's bear testimony to this situation, much like the situation of gold-rush towns in California shortly after the discovery of gold in 1849. Farabee depicts the grim situation of brutal treatment of workers, severe epidemic diseases and displacement of different native slaves from all over the Amazon to fulfill the industrial world's insatiable lust for rubber to make tires for cars and belts for machines.

To escape illness, slavery, and other atrocities, many native groups throughout the region headed for the most remote, hilly areas they could find.