Taxes, taxpayers, and settler colonialism: Toward a critical fiscal sociology of tax as white property

Abstract

In settler colonial states such as Canada, tax is central to political ideas that circulate about Indigenous nations and people. The stories that are told about Indigenous peoples by ‘taxpayers’ often involve complaints about budgets, welfare, and ‘unfair’ tax arrangements. The paper theorizes how informal ‘tax imaginaries’ and ‘taxpayer’ subjectivities are forged through state policy and how ostensibly fiscal concerns are imbricated with white political entitlement that erodes Indigenous legal and political sovereignty. By tracing the construction of taxpayer concerns and tax myths as forms of fiscalized racism, the paper demonstrates the importance of tax to settler colonialism and the shape of Indigenous-settler relations. Taxpayer subjects are not just legal or material positionings in relation to tax and the state, but powerful subjects that refigure political problems as ‘fiscal’ and construct Indigenous people and nations through racialized repertoires of property and possession.