Accounting for Genocide: Canada's Bureaucratic Assault on Aboriginal People

This work retells the history of the subjugation and economic marginalization of Canada's indigenous peoples, both in the past and now. It shows how successive Canadian governments have combined accounting techniques and economic rationalizations with bureaucratic mechanisms - what are called soft technologies - to deprive native peoples of their land and natural resources, and to control the minutiae of their daily economic and social lives. It reveals that Canadian federal and provincial governments are still prepared today to use legislative and fiscal devices to help large corporations to continue to exploit and irreparably damage indigenous people's lands whether for the purposes of mining, hydro power, or industry. What becomes clear is how accountants and their culturally bounded procedures play a far more ubiquitous role in our lives than we might imagine. In the case of Canada's indigenous populations, the cumulative result has been nothing less than a cultural genocide which, in today's terms, would be described as a form of ethnic cleansing.