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.

Fiscal geographies between the crisis and the pandemic

“…As she writes, “[t]ax exemption status is thus one of the key adaptive repair tactics of the imperial financial relations stretching between the United States and Puerto Rico, and through which the United States retains non-democratic control over the material conditions of everyday Puerto Ricans and their built environment, as well as the capacity to recalibrate these accumulative relations (and therefore, living conditions) when desired” (Ponder, 2022: 8). Willmott (2022) shows through his engagement with the concept of “tax imaginaries” that fiscal policy has played a critical role in Canadian settler colonialism and the perpetuation of racial stereotypes.…”

An Alaska tax story: Tribal sovereignty, settler colonialism, and the Indigenous tax space

“…In doing so, I draw on scholarship on the political and socio-legal role of tax laws and policies in (settler) colonial contexts (e.g., Dennison, 2012; Likhovski, 2017; Sheild Johansson, 2018; Willmott, 2020). In present-day Canada, for example, Kyle Willmott (2022) asserts that the “informal political life of tax” conspires with other ingredients of governmentality, thereby boosting the socio-political clout of the settler state. In the USA, Jean Dennison (2014) demonstrates how tax belongs to what she calls “whitewashing,” namely “a variety of techniques utilized to assert and justify settlement” that bolster settler colonialism’s innate and continuing effort to “eliminate” Indigenous Peoples (Dennison, 2014: 163, citing Wolfe, 2006).…”

Praise the Gardeners, Dun the Hunters: Alaska Natives, Taxation, and Settler Colonialism

“…In doing so, I analyze how a preexisting “civilizing” landscape reshaped the initial revenue-raising function of the tax, turning it into a discrete yet powerful colonizing instrument. The article draws on the work of scholars who have unpacked the sociocultural and political dimensions of the taxation of Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States (Levitt 2018; Simpson 2008; 2014; Willmott 2020; 2022; Pasternak 2016; Eaglewoman 2007; Tillotson 2017; Zahnd 2022). There, the “logic of elimination”—the blunt replacement of Natives by newcomers (Wolfe 2006)—empowered tax laws and policies with the ability to make and break one’s socio-political belonging (Zahnd 2022).…”