Within my hometown, the remains of mining’s power over the land are ever-present, from growth to collapse, reclamation and current development. Growing up in the shadow of Sutter's Mill and the California Gold Rush, my life was informed by the history of mining as it shaped the world around me. Traveling across California, Nevada and Arizona this history took new shapes for me as the ravaged and toxic land spread for miles. Dusted grew out of my need to address and question this complex, expanding history, and destroyed land of mining across Western America. Through creating among these forsaken lands, I found the veiled narratives of history tend to focus on glory and not the failures of the past, in doing so this history continues the exploitation of the present. I experienced these continuing ideas of Manifest Destiny perpetually pursued as these companies take land, deplete resources, shutter, and move on, leaving an abandoned populous and a chopped toxic landscape all among stolen land. Seeing and experiencing this devastation, I was charged to convey this story. In photographing the land, people and first hand accounts of history, I seek to bring together a new narrative that responds to and conveys the effects of mining and challenges the words of the past, while revealing what was left in the wake of false promises and hopes created in these conquests and companies.