Power, policy and paperwork: The bureaucratic representation of interests

This article compares how five government documents evaluate a proposed dam in Central Arizona. One of the consequences of this dam would be to force a small Native American community from their ancestral land. Spanning almost forty years, these documents illustrate changes in how a federal agency legitimated these projects and their negative social impacts to different audiences. These records are used here to argue for the importance of careful textual analysis of bureaucratic paperwork, as an additional form of understanding the multiple dimensions of social, economic, and political power over disempowered groups.