Kajkwakratxi

Kajkwakratxi, often called Tapayuna by outsiders, is the people's own name, translated as Trunk of the Sky. Their remembered history places an earlier homeland to the east, in the direction of the rising sun. Tapayuna and Kisêdjê accounts describe a time when the two communities formed one people before moving west towards the Arinos and Sangue rivers of Mato Grosso.

The traditions then describe a separation. The ancestors of the Kisêdjê travelled eastwards through the Ronuro and Xingu headwaters, eventually settling along the Suyá-Missu, while the Tapayuna remained in the Arinos–Sangue country. Anthropologist Anthony Seeger placed the division broadly around the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The dating remains approximate, but the accounts connect Kajkwakratxi history with movement, remembered kinship and the emergence of distinct communities within the river country.