Tax is on the move as a key concept in several disciplines. Rather than viewing tax and taxation regimes as narrowly legal or mechanical, approaches in disciplines such as anthropology, history, sociology, and socio-legal studies, put tax in the foreground as an important element of state building and political life. In these studies, scholars have examined a wide range of empirical settings that demonstrate how tax mediates citizenship regimes, structures ideas about fairness and reciprocity, and facilitates colonial dispossession and racialisation. While tax has been examined in the context of colonialism, as a corollary, very little scholarship has taken an explicit lens through which to understand the life, politics, and mechanics of tax and taxation systems. This chapter builds towards a theoretical approach to understanding tax, specifically in settler colonial contexts, wherein states seek to not only exploit land, but to eliminate Indigenous nations. This lens lends itself to re-casting or revisioning the various normative elements that are embedded in the social analysis of tax, but also has a practical application in seeing tax as a fundamentally constitutive element of colonial expansion, and ongoing settler colonial sedimentation, and specifically sees tax as part of the mundane infrastructure of colonialism (Pasternak et al. Reference Pasternak, Cowen, Clifford, Joseph, Scott, Spice and Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark2023). Decolonising approaches to objects of inquiry necessarily are oriented towards Indigenous sovereignties (Pictou Reference Pictou2020), interrupting colonial modes of knowledge production (Tuhiwai Smith Reference Tuhiwai2012), move away from sanitising the violence of mundane infrastructures of colonialism (Pasternak et al. Reference Pasternak, Cowen, Clifford, Joseph, Scott, Spice and Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark2023), and a realisation that taxes – authored by colonial powers – cannot be ‘decolonized’ by state proclamation (Pictou Reference Pictou2020).

This chapter takes a broad definition of tax, moving away from formal and legalistic avenues of revenue extraction, in line with the anthropology of tax, which has tended to expand the field of view, away from tax as only formal legal mechanisms, or part of a relationship rooted in social contract (Bäumer Escobar Reference Bäumer Escobar2020; Likhovski Reference Likhovski2007; Makovicky & Smith Reference Makovicky and Smith2020; Preston Reference Preston1989; Sheild Johansson Reference Sheild Johansson2020). The approach pursued in this chapter focuses primarily on the idea of tax, and the mobilisation of ‘taxpayer subjectivity’ as a technique of settler colonial governance. The chapter is organised as follows: first, I discuss some recent literature that has examined the relationship between colonialism and tax. Second, I offer some reflections on what a ‘decolonizing’ approach looks like in relation to tax; in line with critical Indigenous understandings of decolonisation (Pictou Reference Pictou2020; Tuhiwai Smith Reference Tuhiwai2012), this should not be mistaken as a metaphor for inclusion in the settler state (Tuck & Yang Reference Tuck and Yang2012). The chapter makes a theoretical argument for the necessity of thinking through tax with a lens that (1) specifically respects the sovereignty of Indigenous nations and (2) offers a critique of how tax operates to erode that sovereignty through ongoing federal missives to install private property regimes on First Nations reserves in Canada. Third, I turn to the case study from my empirical work that demonstrates the theoretical importance of critical Indigenous perspectives on tax. It involves the legal constitution of Canada’s First Nations Financial Transparency Act (FNFTA) in relation to its attempts to reform First Nations governance towards what Turner (Reference Turner2006) calls ‘white paper liberalism’. The federal government organised the data procured from the FNFTA ‘taxpayer’ ethos amongst citizens of First Nations through the publicisation of First Nations band salary details and audits. This taxpayer ethos for the federal government was meant to simultaneously encourage First Nations citizens to critique their governments rather than the federal government, but also to increase the salience of privatisation of property, with the ultimate eye to opening more territory for resource extraction. In short, this approach to tax illuminates how fiscal relations expand the field of vision of colonial states by tying together citizenship subjectivities, taxation, and private property.

Tax and Colonialism

There is a growing concern over the role of tax as a constitutive element of empire and colonial expansion, as a much-needed reminder of the fiscal politics at the centre of global racial capitalism (Brown Reference Brown2022; Carrillo Reference Carrillo2020; Henricks & Seamster Reference Henricks and Seamster2017; Lumba Reference Lumba2022) and the politics of global tax policy wherein tax functions as an extension of empire (Bhambra Reference Bhambra2022; Dick Reference Dick2015), state planning initiatives (Scott Reference Scott1998), or racialised parables about tax havens (Dean & Waris Reference Dean and Waris2020). The domain of tax and colonialism has been a marginal concern, especially compared with other colonial governance tactics, but as recent research demonstrates (Bush & Maltby Reference Bush and Maltby2004; Elmi this volume; Kauppinen this volume; Roitman Reference Roitman2007; Sheild Johansson Reference Sheild Johansson2018, Reference Sheild Johansson2020; Willmott Reference Willmott2020, Reference Willmott2022; Zahnd Reference Zahnd2022), tax should be considered central to colonialism as a historical process, postcolonial geographic contexts, and as I demonstrate here, settler colonial contexts. Sheild Johansson (Reference Sheild Johansson2018) points out how the Bolivian state has approached taxation as a method of ‘inclusion’ into the state project, an attempt to make Indigenous people in Bolivia into taxpayers by an Indigenous-led left government. Roitman (Reference Roitman2007), and Bush and Maltby (Reference Bush and Maltby2004) have examined tax in colonial contexts in African states – how the state makes itself legitimate in pursuit of colonialist extraction and settlement, though Bush and Maltby contest the notion that tax should be seen as a successful method of subjectivation. Literature more situated in postcolonial studies demonstrates the extractive role of taxation in constituting colonialism in place, but also the transference of revenue from one colony to another. Elmi shows how contemporary tax systems in Kenya are ‘modelled on colonial taxation logics’ (page 224, this volume) that amount to a continuance of extractive tax practices. Patnaik (Reference Patnaik, Chakrabarti and Patnaik2017) and Bhambra (Reference Bhambra2020, Reference Bhambra2022) suggest that certain forms of tax imposed by the ‘metropole’ fall under the category of ‘colonial drain’ – tactics whereby imperial empires such as Britain raised revenue in a colony that was reallocated for use by the empire outside of the colony. Not only does this raise the spectre of showing the colonial extraction of resources, of labour, and people, but also of the value that those colonial capitalist enterprises produced. In India, Britain taxed land, opium, and salt to finance its colonial and industrial expansion throughout its many settler colonies (Bhambra Reference Bhambra2020: 7).

These contributions tell us much about how tax and colonialism interact in relation to capitalism and extraction. However, I point out that there are two key missing elements from existing understandings of tax and colonialism. First, by focusing only on the extractive capacities of tax, scholars can miss the productive elements of tax in colonial regimes. That is, that tax does not just simply extract, but that rather it also generates models of citizenship, resistance, and subjectivities that shape political conduct. It is this ‘productivity’ that my case study will illuminate later in this chapter. Second, scholarship should attend to ongoing relationships between Indigenous nations, settler colonialism and tax as a technique of citizenship (see also Willmott Reference Willmott2022; Vicol Reference Vicol2020). This is emphasised by demonstrating the ongoing deleterious effects of capital accumulation on Indigenous land (Pasternak Reference Pasternak2015) or the building of the welfare state in the west at the behest of former colonies (Bhambra Reference Bhambra2022), or colonial debt (Dick Reference Dick2015). Bhambra’s (Reference Bhambra2022) and Ogle’s (Reference Ogle2020) historical work shows how these dynamics are ongoing constitutive elements of exploitation. I suggest, in complement to this literature, that it is important to note that in settler colonies, political regimes that exist to replace Indigenous nations and populations are still in operation. Focusing on either the histories of tax or the residues of these histories in postcolonial states can provide important concepts and theories. But an approach solely focused on these contexts would overlook that tax remains as an ongoing tool of sovereignty exercised by settler colonial states like Canada and the United States (EagleWoman Reference EagleWoman2007; Kiel Reference Kauppinen, Mugler, Sheild Johansson and Smith2019; Neszo Reference Neszo2020; Parent 2020; Pedri-Spade Reference Pedri-Spade2016; Simpson Reference Simpson2014; Willmott Reference Willmott2022; Zahnd Reference Zahnd2022) against Indigenous nations in various ways. In previous work (Willmott Reference Willmott2022), I have shown how in the present that tax operates effectively as a form of white property that presupposes the legitimacy of white political domination, and the illegitimacy of Indigenous resistance and nationhood. As a settler colonial state, where the colonising polities did not just see the land as a site of exploitation, but sought to eliminate and replace the population, tax and fiscal processes in Canada have played specific roles in sedimentation of these relations.

First Nations people in what is currently Canada were ‘exempted’ from paying tax on on-reserve property, and some sales and excise taxes in the Indian Act. The source of this exemption flows from various political and jurisprudential interpretations from treaty relationships, sedimented crown-Indigenous legal relationships that respected nation-to-nation relations, but also settler colonial political ideas that regarded First Nations as wards of the state, and unready for the ‘civilizing’ status that bureaucrats felt tax carried (Bartlett Reference Bartlett1992; Bryan Reference Bryan2020; Heaman Reference Heaman2013; Willmott Reference Willmott2020; Zahnd Reference Zahnd2022). Historically, some provinces, such as British Columbia, fought vociferously over the right to tax status Indians, which the province’s governor at the time suggested would help in the ‘civilization’ process (Heaman Reference Heaman2013). Section 87 of the Indian Act, the omnibus legislation that governs the relationship between Canada and First Nations, is not the only source of tax-related contention for First Nations, and it has only been over the last forty years that court decisions have solidified some of these limited rights to not be taxed. But, as policy analysts have pointed out, there are other ways that fiscal policies have been used to erode Indigenous rights and Indigenous sovereignty (Diabo Reference Diabo, Macfarlane and Schabus2017; Pasternak Reference Pasternak2015, Reference Pasternak2016). These ongoing dynamics require that scholars grapple with what tax has meant in settler colonial contexts.

Decolonising Tax?

In settler states, the common assumption that the ‘colonial era’ is over mystifies ongoing political relationships between Indigenous nations and settler states, and the relationship between colonialism and extractive capitalism. Looking at tax in this way allows us to see the direct strategic state attempts to undermine Indigenous sovereignty as a legal tactic, or to construct tax and taxpaying as benevolent acts of ‘good citizenship’. The approach I think with here illuminates how in many cases, tax is an imposition of settler colonial states onto Indigenous nations, and sees tax as not only nation-building, but nation-eliminating.

Indian Affairs – the bureaucracy in Canada that enforces the Indian Act – has long been enamoured by the notion of tax as a currency of civilising citizenship for Indigenous peoples. Examining how tax can be imagined outside the realm of an affirmative liberal state-building project must be a part of decolonising how we think about tax, and what tax might mean for Indigenous sovereignty. For example, Tait (Reference Tait2017) has examined how First Nations have legally navigated the imposition of tax through treaty relations and EagleWoman (Reference EagleWoman2007) has charted out how tax can be used in the context of assertions of sovereignty. The object of this chapter is to complicate how tax is used as settler colonial strategy, and for those purposes, anti-colonial modes of thought are not a call for inclusion (Tuhiwai Smith Reference Tuhiwai2012), or reproducing liberal politics of recognition. By rethinking the politics of taxation from an Indigenous perspective, we need to ‘unsettle’ (Tuck & Yang Reference Tuck and Yang2012) the analysis of it, contest its legitimacy, and to recast tax around material dispossession of Indigenous territory (EagleWoman Reference EagleWoman2007). Tax, while often seen as a method of democratic collective-making, should not be shielded from political scrutiny where it is required. The approach pursued here takes seriously what it means to say that tax in settler colonial states functions as a technology of citizenship, making up both Indigenous, and settler taxpayers (Willmott Reference Willmott2022).

Audra Simpson points out quite simply, ‘to be taxed, is to be a citizen’ (Reference Simpson2008: 212). For those who belong to Indigenous nations, tax authorised by and for Canada is akin to paying for one’s own colonisation. For those who are committed to the idea of Indigenous nationhood, be that a Squamish nationhood or a Mi’kmaq nationhood, tax is one of the further methods that the Canadian state might use to make new Canadians. Tax has the reciprocal power to assimilate, and make citizens. As Bush and Maltby observe, taxation occupies a special place in the imaginaries of both liberal and leftist readings of history: ‘From the perspective of the colonised, the history of taxation is part of the Marxist/liberal universalist history of progress’ (Reference Bush and Maltby2004: 7). While research has attended to the role of tax as a component of colonial government in various contexts (Buhr Reference Buhr2011; Bush & Maltby Reference Bush and Maltby2004; Kauppinen this volume; Neu & Graham Reference Neu and Graham2006; Roitman Reference Roitman2007; Sheild Johansson Reference Sheild Johansson2018), there has been little empirical attention, and even less theoretical attention paid to taxation and settler colonialism, especially in contemporary scholarship. Indigenous policy analysts such as Kahnawake Mohawk Russ Diabo (Reference Diabo, Macfarlane and Schabus2017) have paid attention to the role of taxation in Canada’s termination agenda in relation to First Nations; Diabo points out that the notorious ‘White Paper’ of 1969 that proposed the total legal assimilation of First Nations had argued for the importance of tax. Other scholars have produced scholarship on the ‘fiscal warfare’ (Pasternak Reference Pasternak2016) and fiscalised racism (Willmott Reference Willmott2022) that is at the heart of Indigenous–state relations in Canada (see also Willmott & Skillings Reference Willmott and Skillings2021).

I suggest that we should follow the caution of Martin, Mehrotra, and Prasad (Reference Martin, Mehrotra, Prasad, Martin, Mehrotra and Prasad2009) – and not simply examine tax as one of the various tools the state has at its disposal. By pointing out how tax could be used as a tool of colonialism, is to treat tax as symptomatic, rather than constitutive or generative. It ignores how tax secures colonial possession (EagleWoman Reference EagleWoman2007), or how tax becomes one of the political currencies of settler colonialism in the contemporary (Willmott Reference Willmott2020, Reference Willmott2022), or the role of racialization in the past (Walsh Reference Walsh2018). And because of this, this approach requires a political ethic that upends the assimilative drive that often comes with tax and the desire to refigure people through the lens of tax. Another element to consider is that thinking about tax through this lens should not necessarily limit us to thinking of the state, or only of relations that flow from the state. The state is but one entity in settler states that must be subjected to analysis; there are a range of activities from Indigenous nations that use tax to combat settler sovereignty (Zahnd Reference Zahnd2022); centring the state only reifies it as the central object in research on tax, when there are much broader cultural and political movements involved in shaping the form of tax politics, such as municipalities (Kiel Reference Kauppinen, Mugler, Sheild Johansson and Smith2019), taxpayer groups (Willmott & Skillings Reference Willmott and Skillings2021), worker collectives (Bäumer Escobar Reference Bäumer Escobar2020), political discourses (Williamson Reference Williamson2017), and the work on the range of fiscal citizenships (Guano Reference Guano2010; Likhovski Reference Likhovski2007; Makovicky & Smith Reference Makovicky and Smith2020). These reflections on a decolonizing approach to tax bring me to the case study that illuminates the politics of tax and colonialism in Canada. This case examines the structure of the FNFTA, as an attempt by the Canadian state to create ‘Indigenous taxpayers’. My analysis shows that rather than creating an actual material relationship of paying taxes to the state it constitutes a form of governmentality in which people come to reconfigure their political relationships with the state and their First Nations to be one primarily experienced through a fiscal lens.

The First Nations Financial Transparency Act

The FNFTA (Bill C-575) was first introduced in the House of Commons as a private members Bill by a Conservative Member of Parliament in 2010. The Act requires First Nations to annually produce a set of consolidated financial statements. The FNFTA attempts to standardise the reporting and distribution of financial information – or rather in the language of the government, ‘modernise’ how First Nations report their finances and subject them to a public-facing audit. Audits of consolidated financial statements are a regular practice in First Nations governance; all First Nations bandsFootnote ¹ that are governed under the Indian Act have always had to report their financial statements to Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC), spelled out in what are called ‘funding agreements’ between Canada and individual First Nations. These agreements already have heavy penalties for non-compliance, which have historically and contemporarily served as tools of colonial fiscal control (Neu & Therrien Reference Neu and Therrien2003; Pasternak Reference Pasternak2016).Footnote ² In a further expansion of disclosure and transparency, the Act requires First Nations to prepare a schedule of the salaries and benefits of chiefs and councillors which are then published on a centralised website managed by INAC. This provision transforms the information from an accounting reporting mechanism in which audits and schedules of remuneration are used by INAC, to information made transparent for consumption by ‘the public’, not just the public of a given First Nation. All data required to be posted online were already required to be submitted to INAC prior to the passage of the FNFTA – in effect, the only change prescribed by the FNFTA was that this data be made publicly available (Dyck Reference Dyck2013; Palmater Reference Palmater2011).

The FNFTA, or ‘effin’ FTA’, as it became known in Indigenous circles (Harp Reference Harp2015), was met with a great deal of resistance by a number of forces, including First Nations governments who would be subjected to the Act’s legal provisions, coalition organisations like the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) that staunchly opposed the Bill on its constitutionality, and prominent Indigenous political thinkers (Palmater Reference Palmater2014b) who came out strongly against the Bill as an attack on Indigenous sovereignty. While social policy scholars in Canada (McKeen & Porter Reference McKeen, Porter, Clement and Vosko2003; Pulkingham & Ternowetsky Reference Pulkingham, Ternowetsky, Pulkingham and Ternowetsky1997) have generally focused on the retrenchment of the welfare state during the Mulroney and Chretien governments, it is important to note that federal governments have ignored or underfunded treaty obligations to First Nations for a far longer time in pursuit of fiscal control and elimination (Palmater Reference Palmater2014a). Historically, one example is through Indian Agents who were tasked with exacting strict budgeting measures in First Nations reserves, not only to reduce the ‘burden’ on the Indian Department’s budget, but also to force Indigenous peoples to become subjects of the market economy (Brownlie Reference Brownlie2003; Shewell Reference Shewell2004). More recent policy interventions have continued the Canadian legacy of aggressive fiscal parsimony, through emergency management (Dafnos Reference Dafnos2018), and fiscal retrenchment in relation to First Nations social welfare (Palmater Reference Palmater2011). Mi’kmaq legal scholar Pamela Palmater described the FNFTA as an attack that drew upon racist ideas about Indigenous leaders and politics. She wrote that ‘presenting accountability legislation as the solution implies that First Nations are the cause of their own poverty – a racist stereotype Harper’s Conservatives use quite frequently to divide community members from their leaders and Canadians from First Nations’ (Palmater Reference Palmater2014b). And indeed, as my research (Willmott Reference Willmott2022; Willmott & Skillings Reference Willmott and Skillings2021) has demonstrated, right wing political advocacy groups had used the legislation and controversy around it to agitate for various anti-Indigenous political goals, and to foment white possessive (Moreton-Robinson Reference Moreton-Robinson2015) ‘taxpayer’ outrage more generally against First Nations. One of the effects of the FNFTA was to strongly coarsen, and reduce the already tenuous understanding many Canadians have of First Nations governments – a key political goal that reduced citizenship to fiscal concerns, a point I continue to discuss in the next section.

Making ‘Indigenous Taxpayers’

As explained, INAC has long been enamoured by ideas around tax and First Nations. It would be an error to entirely attribute this to a ‘revenue desire’ – whereby the federal government wants to create colonial drains to extract tax. As Simpson (Reference Simpson2008, Reference Simpson2014) has shown, this idea has circulated because of the potentiality of tax to solidify Canadian nationhood, and to act as a form of political assimilation. The approach I describe here shows how INAC instead has envisaged tax as a step toward property rights on reserves, a long-term goal of INAC and the federal government (Fabris Reference Fabris, Bruun, Cockburn, Risager and Thorup2018; Jobin Reference Jobin, Cameron, Graben and Napoelon2020; Schmidt Reference Schmidt2018). But for the federal government to actually make this process real, it has to make the forms of citizenship that would desire property and ownership amongst Indigenous peoples. I contend here that promoting fiscal citizenship – making people into ‘taxpayers’ – was a strategic move by the federal bureaucracy to start making subjects who would more readily see private property as an acceptable political solution. The FNFTA was one of the building blocks that would move First Nations people towards that direction, by transforming how people who live on reserve as fiscal subjects that come to deal in market logics as a method for understanding the operation of government. In this sense, the long-term goal of the federal government of pursuing private property on reserves would be made stronger by gaining consent of reserve residents, who in seeing themselves as taxpayers, who would make neoliberal economic (Fabris Reference Fabris, Bruun, Cockburn, Risager and Thorup2018) decisions – and practise fiscal citizenship (Guano Reference Guano2010). In the following section, I outline how the FNFTA relied on two processes to produce information that would help to form taxpayer subjects. First, I identify how the FNFTA harnessed ‘transparency’ by inviting comparison and measurement through the commensuration of financial data of First Nations. Second, I show how the FNFTA rescaled citizenship by redirecting critique away from the federal government and towards First Nations band governments.

Tax, Citizenship, and Colonial Government

The product of commensuration processes invites moral scrutiny of the objects of those processes, in this case, band governments. The strategic use of those products by INAC was directed at and towards members of those band governments and away from the federal government. My position is that these two processes – commensuration and the rescaling of critique – are integral in the subjectification of Indigenous people as Indigenous taxpayers. The culmination of commensuration processes that produce sets of authoritative and putatively objective numbers – figures, facts, budget lines, salaries, and expenses – do a great deal of work on people when they are positioned as methods of veridiction (Willmott Reference Willmott2023). Métis scholar Chris Andersen (Reference Andersen2013) has documented the colonial rationalities inscribed in the Canadian statistical enumeration of Indigenous populations, showing us what numbers and their classificatory authority can inscribe colonial meaning into the issues of internal Indigenous identification. Numbers have a great deal of authority attached to them (Mugler Reference Mugler, Rottenburg, Merry, Park and Mugler2015; Porter Reference Porter1995; Rose Reference Rose1991; Willmott Reference Willmott2023), and this authoritativeness is used to a number of ends, especially with the increasing use of and trust in transparency, audit, and accountability policies (Neu & Graham Reference Neu and Graham2006) in organisational (Espeland & Sauder Reference Espeland and Sauder2007; Shore & Wright Reference Shore and Wright2015), state (Ruppert Reference Ruppert, Rottenburg, Merry, Park and Mugler2015), judicial (Mugler Reference Mugler, Rottenburg, Merry, Park and Mugler2015), and other processes. What these numbers represent in the field of government is the move towards the quantification of political conduct. Espeland and Sauder argue that ‘quantification … permits scrutiny of complex or disparate phenomena in ways that enable judgment … by simplifying, excluding and integrating information, quantification expands the comprehensibility and comparability of social phenomena in ways that permit strict and dispersed surveillance’ (Reference Espeland and Sauder2007: 415). To be addressed with specific forms of information asks people to reconsider their political conducts and their citizenship practices vis-à-vis the state, not as a citizen, band member, or voter, but as a taxpayer, uniting both liberal political rationalities and settler colonial rationalities. A number of scholars have examined the taxpayer as an identity that appears around Indigenous redress (Henderson Reference Henderson2015; Willmott Reference Willmott2022), a racialized legal-cultural actor (Walsh Reference Walsh2018), as a symbolic actor used to construct distance between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ populations (Martin & Kidder Reference Martin and Kidder2012; Stanley Reference Stanley2016; Williamson Reference Williamson2017), as complex cultural relations between citizen and state (Björklund Larsen Reference Björklund Larsen2017; Tillotson Reference Tillotson2017), and as a liberal political subject that governs the state (Willmott Reference Willmott2017). Here, I look at the assembly of the taxpayer as a reconfiguration of Indigenous citizenship around the critique of government under the auspices of the market (Altamirano-Jiménez Reference Altamirano-Jiménez2004).

A taxpayer subject is empowered to think with a specific repertoire of action, scepticism towards government, vigilance against expenditure, and a rubric for rendering activities of the state. The taxpayer subject is made responsible for critiquing government using the bevy of numbers that are produced in audits, and disclosed through transparency devices. Of course, the very goal of the FNFTA was to produce these kinds of vigilant conducts, deputised to act on band governments with incontestable data. To enact subjectification, however, the government deftly avoided legislative imposition of maximum salaries for band chiefs and councillors, so that the data could do their own work. A senior bureaucrat told me that it was a strategic choice to not impose more burdensome legislation – to build the capacity of band members to govern their own conducts and in turn govern the conducts of their bands; changes had to come from band members themselves, rather than the federal government:

The taxpayer governmentality that flows from transparency and disclosure does work on people, making them responsible for reading evidence, acting on that evidence and investing in themselves. To have people render their relationship with a government as a technical–fiscal relationship is to render politics as an objective process in budget making, where band governments become vehicles of investment and atrophy, rather than decision-making based on a particular First Nation’s values, nationhood or decision-making structure. Instead of envisioning new ways of improving the community, the Indigenous taxpayer is empowered to shrink the scope of their community’s government.

Using these numbers as the material of subjectivation, INAC looked to reform how it is that Indigenous people relate to their Nation. Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred points out that ‘traditional indigenous nationhood stands in sharp contrast to the dominant understanding of “the state”: there is no absolute authority, no coercive enforcement of decisions, no hierarchy, and no separate ruling entity’ (Reference Alfred, Maaka and Andersen2006: 323). The further reduction of Indigenous peoples’ citizenship to taxation is itself a further attempt to assimilate First Nations into Canada. First Nations citizenship or nationhood is extremely complex because each nation has its own ideas, laws, and membership codes. But what taxpayer citizenship represents is another level of alienation – not simply the imposition of a liberal notion of citizenship (Alfred Reference Alfred2009). Taxpayer citizenship further detaches people from the collective, and it asks of them to make decisions about their futures as individuals based on putatively objective fiscal information. For bureaucrats, the FNFTA reduces the density, history, and complexity of Indigenous people’s relationships with their governments. Indeed, the very strategic usefulness of the taxpayer subject for governments that wish to avoid social policies is summed up well by a bureaucrat involved with finance speaking about how they wished for members of First Nations to use the information that FNFTA made public.

For INAC, the taxpayer is theorised as an unselfish and moral subject, acting on the needs of the greater fiscal good, rather than on ‘impulsive’ and ‘avaricious’ needs, which for the bureaucrat in here includes something as basic as shelter. This quote illuminates one of INAC’s goals with this legislation: reducing the ‘burden’ of treaty rights and collective responsibilities through remaking the political conducts of Indigenous peoples. The taxpayer, as it has been variously theorised across disciplines cannot be understood as a neutral political project in a settler regime. It is rather a specific move by the state towards assimilation, and political absorption through a mobile set of fiscal citizenship logics. The case I have presented illuminates how tax comes to form an element of colonial strategy that pushes Indigenous peoples towards private property, liberalism, and new modes of citizenship.

Conclusion

This chapter offers some reflections towards a decolonising analysis of taxation in settler societies. I argue that tax scholars must grapple with the long histories of tax and colonialism, and specifically must examine how settler colonialism structures tax in the present, with significant implications for how Indigenous peoples in settler states interact with citizens, state, and sovereignty. While adding to existing literature on the interaction between tax and colonialism, I lay out through a case study of the FNFTA how the state comes to rely on tax as a technique of subject formation – making political citizens – and how this, in colonial contexts, means a further retrenchment of colonial control of Indigenous nations. The usefulness of an ‘Indigenous taxpayer’ subject to the federal government reveals exactly how fiscal relations, and ideas about fiscal processes, are involved in ongoing colonial relationships. For the growing number of scholars interested in taxes across disciplines, this means that a decolonising approach to tax must be considered for a fuller account of how tax works across different sovereignties. My position here is that a fuller account does not simply entail ‘understanding’ the connection between tax and colonial regimes, or thinking beyond the metaphors employed to grasp the effects of colonialism, but to move towards a critical approach that actively undermines colonial and settler colonial rule in favour of Indigenous nationhood and sovereignty.