This map series considers how the Lower Gila River and its communities, language and life ways were disappeared and replaced by railroads, borders and bombing ranges...AND how they resisted, survived, and continue, through stories, dreams, and spiritual and physical travel to, from and around the river today.
The Lower Gila River is O’odham, Piipaash, Quechan, Xawill Kwñchawaay, Hopi and A:shiwi land. It has long been an important guide for people traveling through the desert for trade, migration, war and communication. Its waters, plants, animals and communities sustained life for those who journeyed along its banks. Despite land and water theft, and erasure of people and places perpetrated by successive colonizers, the people’s connection to the land has never been severed. It continued, and continues, through dreams, sacred runs, language, and stories as well as spiritual and physical travel to the Lower Gila River.
Sonoran Desert Journeys: The Lower Gila River explores the impact of colonialism on the Lower Gila River through a series of maps that visualize the changes to language, community, travel routes and the course of the Gila River itself. The series puts the lie to the idea that when the Spanish and US American conquistadors arrived at the Lower Gila River area, they “discovered” an “empty land.” Rather when they were guided to the area by O’odham and Piipaash guides they were introduced to human and natural landscapes rich in culture, environment, and connection between people to the land, and to each other through communication, trade, and shared practice of seasonal migration in relationship to changes to the land and water that sustained physical and spiritual life.
I am indebted to Ronald Geronimo, Fillman Bell, Harry Winters, Bill Broyles, and Aaron Wright for their work sharing O'odham, Piipaash, Quechan and other Indigenous place names and to Catherine Gilman's maps for the Great Bend of the Gila project. A complete list of research sources can be found here.