The outlines of the lost landscapes of Quitobaquito--now further threatened by the looming border wall--reemerge in Peoples of a Sonoran Desert Oasis as Jared Orsi tells the story of the land, its inhabitants ancient and recent, and the efforts of the NPS to "reclaim" Quitobaquito's pristine natural form and to reverse the damage done to the O'odham community and culture, first by colonial incursions and then by proponents of "preservation."

Quitobaquito is ecologically and culturally rich, and this book summons both the natural and human history of this unique place to describe how people have made use of the land for some five hundred generations, subject to the shifting forces of subsistence and commerce, tradition and progress, cultural and biological preservation. Throughout, Orsi details the processes by which the NPS obliterated those cultural landscapes and then subsequently, as America began to reckon with its colonial legacy, worked with O'odham peoples to restore their rightful heritage.

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.