Years prior to the Battle of Naboo, the pirate group that would become Q'anah's Marauders was led by the youngest son of the Asmeru noble house of Elegin. The group he led eventually was joined by his lover, who fought alongside them and later gave birth to his triplets. The pirate leader was captured and sentenced to death, executed on the planet Karfeddion. Effectively headless, his lover took command of the organization, taking the name Q'anah.
The group expanded its operation to encompass the entirety of the Mid Rim's Senex-Juvex region, with Q'anah becoming a folk hero in the Senex. Though Q'anah was twice captured and sentenced to life imprisonment during this period, she was twice rescued by her gang. Following a violent encounter with Judicial Forces of the Galactic Republic, in which the pirates destroyed six starships, a bounty was placed on Q'anah's head. This prompted the pirate queen to relocate to the Greater Seswenna region of the Outer Rim Territories.
The Greater Seswenna was a region rarely patrolled by the Judicials, and made for easy pickings for the Marauders. Q'anah rose to the head of an alliance of various pirate groups, and working in tandem they were able to prey upon convoy shipments of lommite ore from Eriadu to the Core Worlds. She developed a unique method of attacking the convoy's "shepherd vessel" and any security ships, while targeting five specific slave-rigged lommite cargo containers. The containers, unslaved from the convoy and then slaved to a pirate vessel, were selected by varying combinations of the digits 23416, the date of the Q'anah festival, which became the group's signature tactic. At its height, the pirate flotilla, containing large numbers of corvettes and frigates such as the Elegin's Hope, were able to successfully distract the limited resources of Outland Regions Security Force during their raids; their numerical superiority combined with Q'anah's ingenious tactics forced Eriadu Mining to implicitly accept the loss of much of its assets in the name of cost-effectiveness.
Despite Eriadu Mining's eventual conclusion that the attacks on convoys were random and impossible to stop, Wilhuff Tarkin, a young lieutenant of Outland's anti-pirate taskforce, determined over the course of months the nature of Q'anah's signature style of attack. He crafted a plan to implant computer viruses in the container's hyperdrive motivators. Once the Marauders raided a convoy, the viruses would override the pirate navicomputers and deliver them to a point in realspace where the Outland task force would be lying in wait. The plan worked perfectly, and Q'anah was captured by forces led by Ranulph Tarkin and brought before his young cousin who had outsmarted the pirate queen.
The captives were then placed onboard a cargo container which was programmed to fly slowly toward the system's sun. The younger Tarkin had the audio and video feeds from the container left on so that both the security forces and other pirates could witness the Marauder's death, cooked alive by the sun's heat. Several other Marauder vessels arrived in futile rescue attempts, but were destroyed on sight by the Outlands flotilla. Now leaderless, the remaining Marauders fled into hiding after the incident, ending their supremacy over the trade routes of the Seswenna once and for all.
With no pirate queen, the Marauders ceased to be an active threat to galactic trade, going underground. Certain remnants of the Marauders, however, eventually reformed themselves into Culoss (from "Q-less", or "without a Q") following her death, led by the figure known as Angel. Though they would never regain their former presence, they continued to mount small-scale hijacking operations in the Outer Rim well into the Imperial Era, hiring figures such as the rebel agent Nevil Cygni (codenamed Nightswan). Tarkin developed a certain notoriety among the surviving followers of Q'anah, who told tales of his merciless role in Q'anah's gruesome death to younger pirates.