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Records hold enormous power over people’s life and well-being, so does their absence. Withholding, destroying, or not creating records at all continues to be a major tactic of control. Yet, losing one’s records and having no records does not set a person free. Instead, it creates sprawling problems and sets up multiple barriers, but few take a recordkeeper to court to compel them to fix the system, particularly when the recordkeeper in question is the United States government. This study is about such a case. It examines the role of records and recordkeeping in upholding or suppressing social justice for a large group of Native American people using the legal documents of Cobell v Salazar — the largest class-action suit in the U.S. history – as an exemplar. It surveys deposition statements, Congressional hearings, witness statements, oral arguments, appellate court decisions, and legal opinions issued on the case in order to understand the summoning of Indian trust records at pivotal moments of litigation as evidence of the government performance of its duties or as evidence of its failure to performance such duties. It presents the findings in three vignettes, each dedicated to a specific aspect of the story — damage in archival storage; availability, access, and accuracy; and the impact of the colonial legacy on institutional recordkeeping practices. The narrative juxtaposes the imagined totality of the government archives with the realities of century-long mismanagement and poor recordkeeping that participated in the exploitation of Native Americans in the past and the present. The study concludes with a few propositions regarding the relationship between records, archives and governing and outlines several prospective avenues for future explorations of the co-evolving practices of recordkeeping, archiving, and governing.

This study was motivated by a variety of democratic experience in the world that interchangeably perplexes and inspires students of politics. To understand the processes by which democracies emerge, this study was launched to examine new democracies from a discursive perspective. Four main questions guided the inquiry: (1) Is there a rhetorical/discursive counterpart to the process of democratization? (2) If so, what are the rhetorical features and markers of democratic changes? (3) What specific discursive practices correlate with growth and/or decline of democracy? and (4) What practical value might there be to having a more sensitive measure of democratic growth and/or decline? To answer these questions, a critical discourse analysis was conducted on two genres of Russian public discourse juxtaposing lay (letters to the editor) and elite (editorials) voices in three national periodicals during four election seasons between 1996 and 2008. The analysis of lay discourse revealed (a) that ordinary Russians enjoy expressing their opinions, (b) that they are argumentative, (c) that their repertoire of political voices is rather small, and (d) that their discussions are gradually sliding toward trivial matters. These findings portrayed a public that is attentive to public affairs and speaks out in a forum. Elite voices, on the other hand, were found (e) to be mesmerized by politics, (f) to think of the political world as detached from ordinary life, and (g) to envision the audience of ironic bystanders. Together, these findings pointed to a conclusion that ordinary Russians are rarely summoned either to renew democracy or to improve upon it. Consequently, they rarely identify themselves as true democrats, although many of their discursive practices resemble those that are thought of as a staple of the democratic public sphere.