Monday, February 16, 2026: Sonoran Desert Journeys with Joanne Coutts

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Join us at the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson. The forum will be held from 2-3pm, followed by an optional Sonoran Desert Journey personal map-making activity. This event is free, and donations are welcome.

How we speak about the landscape impacts our relationship to it. The English language does not have the words to describe the variety of forms of the mountains in the Sonoran Desert. U.S. maps inscribe a colonial version of history on the landscape with place names based on Spanish, Mexican and U.S. American conquistadors and settlers.

The Sonoran Desert Journeys forum will discuss using historical and contemporary maps to learn to navigate, identify place names and speak about the desert in a way that honors and values the land, the water and all the humans and non-humans who call the desert home.

We will talk about how O’odham travel was and is aided by a detailed naming of mountains, water sources and other geographic features that enable people to navigate through the desert. In contrast, American travel and settlement erased many of these names and replaced them with names that required printed maps and technology to allow people to use them for navigation. We will talk about how people forced into traveling through the desert today, often as a result of climate change, violence in their home countries and immigration policies, have created their own place names to guide them on their journeys through the Sonoran Desert.

Joanne Coutts is an independent cartographer exploring our relationships with land and water by centering localness and solidarity. Her current projects use counter-mapping to support humanitarian aid at the U.S./Mexico border and contribute to efforts for water rights - and rights for water. Joanne’s work has also been presented at the Tri-National Sonoran Desert Symposium, the University of Arizona Feminist Visualization Challenge, Detroit Bioneers, HASTAC, Veterans for Peace War Resisters Network and many other academic and community organizations. She was a 2024 Artist in Residence at Glen Arbor Arts Center and has been featured in the Detroit Institute of Arts Ofrenda de Muerte exhibit where she created “Desconcido,” which honored the lives of the more than 2,000 people who have died crossing the Sonoran Desert who remain “unidentified.” Joanne shares her love of maps at workshops for schools, libraries, and community groups.