Do some work for me: Settler colonialism, professional communication, and representations of Indigenous water

The Bureau of Reclamation, a federal agency within the Department of the Interior, is responsible for diverting, delivering, and storing water in the Western U.S. It controls hydroelectric dams and irrigation projects that require Indigenous lands and waterways to operate; it is further a settler colonial institution in that its projects enable non-Indigenous settlement. The Bureau of Reclamation published a monthly magazine as a public-facing form of professional communication for nearly 80 years to narrate diversions of Indigenous water. A typical issue included updates on engineering feats, Reclamation construction, transcriptions of political speeches, legal decisions on water, practical instruction for farmers, and black-and-white photographs of water. It was not enough to use dams and reservoirs to control water; the Bureau of Reclamation had to narrate it, too. This form of professional communication reveals how hydroelectric dams are built with more than engineering equipment—their tools also include narratives, language, rhetoric, and image that recast Indigenous waterways for settler audiences. This paper identifies the settler colonial narratives this archival magazine employed from 1924 - 1942—a particularly intense time of damming—and then juxtaposes the magazine with contemporary Indigenous literature about dams to undermine the Bureau's recasting of water for white settlers.