Legibility, misrecognition and the Aboriginal Peoples Survey: understanding knowledge production as a settler-colonial project

Colonial Numbers: Quantification, Indigeneity, and the Politics of Fiscal Surveillance

“…I argue that colonial numbers act as part of settler knowledge infrastructures that then fuel surveillant political conducts. Numbers in their various forms can fuel "fiscalized racism" (Willmott 2022), giving credence to racist myths, byzantine policy reports, and the delegitimation of Indigenous knowledge (Walter and Andersen 2013;Midzain-Gobin 2021). In the settler colonial context, fiscal surveillance is done with the political end of reducing the political capacities of Indigenous Nations, reducing the fiscal obligations of settler states to the Indigenous Nations whose territories they violently occupy, and promoting "taxpayer" scrutiny of Indigenous life.…”