Description:
Tracing the building and erasing of past landscapes to make some of them more visible in the present, Peoples of a Sonoran Desert Oasis reveals how colonial legacies became embedded in national parks--and points to the possibility that such legacies might be undone and those lost landscapes remade.
Brief description:
Jared Orsi is Professor of History at Colorado State University and has served as the Colorado State Historian. He is the author of Citizen Explorer: The Life of Zebulon Pike and Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles.
Review Quotes: "Peoples of a Sonoran Desert Oasis gets to the heart of one of the great debates in the history of conservation: whether there are any true 'wildernesses'--pristine natural areas untouched by human hands--and, when we set aside protected areas like national parks, whether we should remove evidence of human occupation. The author does a marvelous job weaving O'odham oral traditions and histories into this historical account of Quitobaquito."--Thomas E. Sheridan, author of Arizona: A History