The Aguaruna (or Awajún, their endonym) are an indigenous people of the Peruvian jungle. They live primarily on the Marañón River in northern Peru near the border with Ecuador and several of the Marañón's tributaries, the rivers Santiago, Nieva, Cenepa, Numpatakay and Chiriaco. Currently, they possess titled community lands in four of Peru's regions: Amazonas, Cajamarca, Loreto, and San Martín. A significant Awajún population also lives in the Alto Mayo river basin in the Department of San Martín. According to Peru's 1993 Census the Aguaruna numbered approximately 5,000. World Census data for 2000 lists their population at just over 8,000. The Awajún resisted efforts to incorporate them into the Inca and Spanish empires. 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. Customs Living arrangements Awajún families, either monogamous or polygamous, traditionally lived in dispersed neighborhoods of kin related through descent and marriage. 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. Examples of Awajún towns include Yutupiza on the Santiago River and Japaime on the Nieva. 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. These houses are distributed in a kind of asymmetric form and the tendency is usually to place them in a linear form along the river. 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. The Awajún were traditionally a seminomadic population, relocating on a regular basis as soil fertility and wild game populations declined in the immediate vicinity of their houses. 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. Hunting, gathering and agriculture Major species of animals that are hunted by the Aguaruna include the sajino, the huangana, the Brazilian tapir (sachavaca), the little red brocket,