ABSTRACT
From the earliest legislation in 1857 defining the Canadian government's relationship with the First Nations, funding relations have played an important role in encouraging certain behaviours on the part of First Nations peoples (Bartlett 1978, 583). Boldt (1993) suggests that federal government funding methods have been used to encourage institutional assimilation. Other writers refer to the use of money by-laws, taxation policies and so forth, tightly coupled with bureaucratic and political measures such as municipal forms of government, as “coercive tutelage” (Dyck 1991) aimed at colonizing First Nations peoples (Frideres 1990, 3). These quiet technologies of government stand in contrast, at least in the minds of many Canadians, to the violent methods of domination that characterize other countries' relations with their Aboriginal peoples. Yet a closer look at the mundane technologies of accounting employed by the Canadian government indicates a pervasive coercion lying at the heart of the bureaucratic, procedural approach.
