Accounting for Genocide

Canada’s Bureaucratic Assault on Aboriginal People

Dean Neu, Richard Therrien

Accounting for Genocide is an original and controversial book that retells the history of the subjugation and ongoing economic marginalization of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. Its authors demonstrate the ways in which successive Canadian governments have combined accounting techniques and economic rationalizations with bureaucratic mechanisms—soft technologies—to deprive Native peoples of their land and natural resources and to control the minutiae of their daily economic and social lives. Particularly shocking is the evidence that federal and provincial governments are today still prepared to use legislative and fiscal devices in order to facilitate the continuing exploitation and damage of Indigenous people’s lands.

Contents

• Introduction
• This Land is Our Land
• Unspoken Terror
• Waste Lands
• The Only Possible Euthanasia
• Dreaming of Canada
• Duncan Campbell Scott and the Canadian Indian Department
• Funding “Citizens Plus” 
• Ecocide and Changing Accountability Relations 
• The Subaltern Speaks 
• The Fourth World

About the Authors

Dean Neu became a faculty member in the Haskayne School of Business in 1989. Prior to joining the faculty, he completed a PhD in Accounting and Organizational Theory at Queen’s University. Dean has been a visiting professor at the University of Alberta, the University of Toronto and Universidad de Autonoma del Estado de Morelos in Mexico. He is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Alberta

As an accounting scholar and activist, Dean is committed to unveiling the presence of accounting where we might not otherwise expect to find it, he has in numerous articles and public appearances revealed how accounting plays a mediative role between governments and population segments. His research and writing demonstrate how accounting, working hand in hand with bureaucracies, shapes and constructs societal governance. In this work, the disguise of accounting as a boring benign appendage to business and government is stripped away to reveal how accounting numbers play a crucial role in shaping public policy and the perceptions the public has of those policies.

Dean has published more than fifty research articles in the leading academic and practitioner journals in the field. His awards include: the 1997 Distinguished Service Award from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Alberta in recognition of academic and activist contributions, the 1997 Research Award for outstanding research achievements in the previous year, the 2000 recipient of the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research Leadership, and the 2000 recipient of the MBA society’s award for teaching excellence.

RICHARD THERRIEN is a poet, researcher, cultural worker, editor, filmmaker, ghost-writer and landscape labourer. His poems and articles appear regularly in a number of journals and he has written reviews for The Calgary Herald and Windspeaker.

Excerpt

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