I use text directly mined from archives such as those from American Foundational documents, treaties, state and federal congressional records, and published letters of correspondence. Fascinated by the way colonial idioms and constitutional references have been reinvented and redefined in the political present, my work explores the primary source. As public information is increasingly defined through dogmatic parameters, seeking also to replace fact with belief, what I began to accumulate was evidence of promises unkept—a verifiable contradiction between the language with which we define our nation and its subsequent actions. This contradiction figures prominently in this series of bronzes, which take the form of discarded and crumpled documents.