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Accounting and the holocausts of modernity

Dean Neu and Cameron Graham
Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Keywords Accounting policy, Accounting history, Accounting procedures Abstract The current study explores the ambiguity of accounting technique in the context of a historical study of the Canadian Indian Department under the direction of Deputy Superintendent D.C. Scott at the beginning of the 20th century. Starting from the work of Bauman and his commentators, we argue that modernity viewed as a set of practices and thought patterns, facilitates bureaucratic constructions of the Indian problem In turn, this cultural milieu and bureaucratic construction operated as an ideological circle, encouraging the use of accounting techniques of governance that permitted both the distancing of bureaucrats from indigenous peoples and the downplaying of other vantage points. However, as our analysis highlights, numerical re-presentations also provided the tools and rhetorical spaces for challenges to government policy. The Nazi mass murder of the European Jewry was not only the technological achievement of an industrial society, but also the organizational achievement of a bureaucratic society (Bauman, 1989).

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The publication of Zygmunt Baumans Modernity and the Holocaust was a signicant moment in social science research. Baumans provocative arguments surrounding not only the roles played by the institutions of modernity in facilitating the Holocaust but also the normality and thus the potential reoccurrence of these events created a restorm of critique and support. Bauman proposed that bureaucratic organizational forms were consistent with modernitys emphasis on instrumental rationality. In turn, the culture of bureaucracy along with its technologies such as accounting, medicine and law allowed Nazi administrators to both distance themselves from their victims and to separate technical and moral judgments bureaucracys double feat is the moralization of technology, coupled with the denial of the moral signicance of non-technical issues ( p. 160). Thus, for Bauman, modernity and bureaucracy provide the conditions of possibility for the holocausts of modernity. Not surprisingly, Baumans claims were subject to intense scrutiny. Critics accused Bauman of misrepresenting modernity (Pellicani, 1998), misreading Weber (du Gay, 1999) and downplaying the aspects of bureaucracy that mitigate the conditions of possibility (OKane, 1997). Defenders praised the originality of Baumans thesis (Zipes, 1991) and accused the critics of playing ideological games. Although the debates over Baumans thesis continue (Delni and Piccone, 1998; Pellicani, 1998), the debates have brought into sharp relief the ambiguity associated with administrative techniques.
Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal Vol. 17 No. 4, 2004 pp. 578-603 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0951-3574 DOI 10.1108/09513570410554560

This manuscript has beneted from the comments of colleagues at the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, University of Wollongong and the Academy of Accounting Historians Conference, as well as those of two anonymous reviewers. The authors thank Richard Therrien for the vital research he provided. Funding provided by SSHRC is gratefully acknowledged.

These tensions regarding the role and functioning of administrative technique have also been present within the accounting literature. On one hand, there has been the recognition that accounting techniques have been complicit in defending dominant interests (Tinker, 1980; Tinker and Neimark, 1987) and that accounting has been salient within processes of colonialism (Davie, 2000; Neu, 2000a) and genocide (Funnel, 1998). This prior research has also noted how such administrative techniques may crowd out moral considerations from decision-making processes (Chwastiak, 1999; Preston et al., 1997). At the same time, prior research has acknowledged that these techniques are not unidirectional (Arnold and Hammond, 1994). For example, Rose comments that in modern democratic discourse, numbers are . . . not univocal tools of domination but mobile and polyvocal resources (Rose, 1991). For Rose and others, administrative techniques such as accounting are both part of a complex of governmental technologies and a resource that can be used to hold government to account ( p. 691). Similarly, administrative techniques such as accounting are not only disciplinary but also enabling that they aid in the formation of the self (Miller and OLeary, 1987, 1993; Townley, 1994). The current study explores the ambiguity of accounting technique in the context of a historical study of the Canadian Indian Department under the direction of Deputy Superintendent D.C. Scott (1862-1947) at the beginning of the 20th century. Starting from the work of Bauman (1989) and his commentators, we argue that modernity, viewed as a set of practices and thought patterns, facilitated bureaucratic constructions of the Indian problem[1]. In turn, this cultural milieu and bureaucratic construction operated as an ideological circle (Smith, 1990), encouraging the use of techniques of governance (Foucault, 1991) which allowed for both the distancing of bureaucrats from indigenous people and the downplaying of other vantage points. However, as our analysis highlights, numerical re-presentations also provided the tools and rhetorical spaces for challenges to government policy. The current study extends an existing and important stream of accounting research (inter alia Annisette, 2000; Davie, 2000; Gallhofer and Chew, 2000; Gibson, 2000; Greer and Patel, 2000; Jacobs, 2000; Neu, 1999, 2000a, b) that not only seeks to locate accounting within imperialism, but also examines the specic effects of accounting on indigenous people around the world. We reinforce this prior research in noting the sometimes terrible outcomes of accounting technologies. However, we also observe that accounting is not uniform or inevitable in its effects, but can create opportunities for resisting the juggernaut of modernity. In this sense, the current study is indebted to previous research on enabling accounting (Arnold and Cooper, 1999; Chew and Greer, 1997; Gallhofer and Haslam, 1997; Shaoul, 1997), which has insisted on a role for accounting in diagnosing and perhaps even helping to remedy the problems to which it has contributed. For a study of the Indian Department, the period under Scott is particularly important because of the lasting impact of the bureaucratic measures undertaken during his tenure. Federal government initiatives such as residential schooling, the centralization and rationalization of the Indian Department along with more micro bureaucratic routines were formative, setting the context for subsequent government-indigenous peoples relations (Titley, 1986, p. 22). However, in addition to having played a key role in initiating these structures of government, Scott epitomizes both the sensibilities and tensions of this era. As an accountant, Scott was

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predisposed to the use of accounting techniques. Under Scott, accounting techniques became a favoured method of translating Indian Department policy into practice. But Scott was also a poet, essayist, prolic letter-writer and an esteemed member of the Royal Society of Canada. He was a man who combined, in a complex and uneasy fashion, the bureaucratic and the a esthetic. This study provides a history of the present (Dean, 1994). On one level, the study illustrates how techniques of governance have been used to re-present indigenous populations and encourage action from a distance (Preston and Oakes, 2001), and reveals the consequences associated with these practices. In the Canadian context, such an understanding is crucial, given the magnitude of government expenditures in the area of native affairs, along with the apparently intractable problems of self-government, outstanding land claims, taxation of First Nations people, ownership of natural resources, and so on (Mercredi and Turpel, 1993). On another level, the study illustrates the empirical data in relation to previous work on governmentality and the holocausts of modernity. In doing so, the study highlights the importance of examining these theoretical notions in specic empirical settings. For example, the study highlights the Janus-faced nature of accounting techniques, in that such techniques function as modes of control yet, at the same time, create the tools and spaces for resistance. Thus, our subsequent analysis suggests that accounting simultaneously facilitates and mitigates the potential holocausts of modernity. The holocausts of modernity In his book Modernity and the Holocaust, zygmunt Bauman proposes that the Holocaust can be viewed as a unique encounter between factors by themselves quite ordinary and common. The Holocaust was not the antitheses of modern civilization but rather an event born and executed in our modern rational society ( p. x). Everything that rendered the Holocaust possible was:
. . . normal in the sense of being fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilization, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent vision of the world all of the proper ways to pursue human happiness together with a perfect society ( p. 8).

For Bauman, the bureaucratic mode of rationality ( p. 15) and the growth of the modern gardening state ( p. 13) are two of the dening characteristics of modernity[2]. Whereas, the modern gardening state emphasizes the civilizing processes and denes governance as being directed toward the management of society, in particular, the task of design, cultivation and weed-control ( p. 13), the bureaucratic form of rationality provided both the attitudes and techniques necessary to accomplish this ( p. 15). Bauman comments that: the light shed by the Holocaust on our knowledge of bureaucratic rationality is at its most dazzling once we realize the extent to which the very idea of the Endlosung [the Final Solution] was an outcome of the bureaucratic culture ( p. 15, emphasis in original). It was the rational world of modern civilization that made the Holocaust thinkable ( p. 13). The Final Solution did not clash with the rational pursuit of efcient, optimal goal-implementation. On the contrary, it arose out of genuinely rational concern, and it was generated by bureaucracy true to its form and purpose. The procedures were routinely bureaucratic: means-ends calculus, budget balancing, universal rule application ( p. 17).

While the culture of bureaucracy prompts us to view the society as an object of administration (du Gay, 1999), it was bureaucratic technologies that both distanced the bureaucrats from their victims and buffered them from the consequences. Thus, the actions are not clearly immoral or unethical morals or ethics simply do not logically or structurally enter the equation. Observes Bauman: the increase in the physical and/or psychic distance between the act and its consequences achieves more than a suspension of moral inhibition . . . [it renders] the victims themselves psychologically invisible ( p. 25). If bureaucracy made such holocausts possible, what were the specic techniques that were salient? Bauman (1989), Funnel (1998) and Hilberg (1985) draw attention to the professions and their knowledges, law, medicine, education, engineering and accounting, focusing on the roles that they played in translating policy objectives into practice. The medical professions involvement in euthanasia programs and medical experimentation and the legal professions roles in drafting and enforcing laws that stripped Jews of their possessions and humanity are but two of the examples of the roles played by expert knowledge in these processes (Funnel, 1998). Although law and medicine were two of the more visible knowledges, Funnel argues that accounting was also salient:
Accounting as an instrument of the new German civil bureaucracy provided at centres of calculation new quantitative visibilities (Miller, 1990, p. 318) that were able to supplant the qualitative dimensions of the Jews as individuals by commodifying and dehumanising them, and thereby, for all intents to make them invisible as people ( p. 439).

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Accounting provided a mode of distantiation allowing bureaucrats to believe that they were dealing with objects rather than individuals ( p. 452). It provided information on Jewish population in distant locales, allowing policy-makers to know how many pieces of human cargo needed to be transported ( p. 454). And it provided information on the costs of the resettlement programs and the associated proceeds ( p. 457). In these ways, accounting was the lifeblood of the Nazi bureaucracy. It provided the techniques that were necessary to plan, operationalize and manage the Final Solution. Funnels discussion of accounting borrows from and overlaps with prior work on technologies of government (Burchell et al., 1991; Foucault, 1991; Miller and Rose, 1990). Miller and Rose propose that technologies of government help to facilitate action at a distance:
We use the term technologies to suggest a particular approach to the analysis of the activity of ruling, one which pays great attention to the actual mechanisms through which authorities of various sorts have sought to shape, normalize and instrumentalize the conduct, thought, decisions and aspirations of others in order to achieve the objectives they consider desirable (1990, p. 8).

Technologies of government are directed toward populations and their thoughts, habits and customs (Foucault, 1991). Mechanisms such as accounting both re-present problems and frame solutions concerning such populations (Preston et al., 1997, p. 153). Like Funnels comment regarding the use of accounting to provide information about distant populations, this perspective proposes that accounting enables knowledges of distant locales to be mobilized and brought home to centres of calculation (Miller and Rose, 1990, p. 9). Similar to maps, accounting calculations construct a particular image of distant sites, thereby, both problematizing certain issues and framing possible

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interventions (Neu, 1999). Furthermore, such interventions are both regulative and distributive since behaviour is regulated and societal wealth re-distributed (Preston et al., 1997, p. 150). From this vantage point, accounting techniques are a set of practices, situated within bureaucratic apparatuses, that permit the exercise of government. Through its representational abilities along with the manner in which it both distances decision-makers from the individuals/populations affected and downplays other vantage points, accounting facilitates governance. However, as a technology of government, these techniques are not static but rather a product of the social relations of the times. Stated differently, accounting techniques need be viewed as an instrumental response to the problems of governance/bureaucracy within a specic institutional eld at a specic juncture in time. As Miller and Napier remind us:
We need to give a history to disparate and variable devices, without submerging or marginalizing them in an unbroken teleological narrative that begins with the invention of double-entry bookkeeping and ends a particular locale in the Anglo-Saxon present ( Miller and Napier, 1993, p. 633).

As we demonstrate in the case that follows, the accounting solutions implemented by Scott reected the zeitgeist of colonial Canada at the beginning of the 20th century, the institutional eld of First Nations-government relations and Scotts unique approach to the problems of governance. Baumans account of the Holocaust along with the subsequent work by Funnel ties together the notions of modernity, bureaucracy and specic techniques such as accounting, proposing that bureaucracy and modernity were the necessary conditions for both the Holocaust ( p. 13) and future Holocausts ( p. 12). Not surprisingly, this work has generated controversy. Although a detailed review of the criticisms and responses are beyond the scope of this study, three issues are relevant to the current study. First, what is modernity and what are its characteristics? Second, what was the role of bureaucracy in these processes? Finally, what differentiates the Holocaust from previous genocides? In his critique of Bauman, Pellicani challenges Baumans denition of modernity, arguing that the dening characteristics of modernity are civilizations based on rights and freedoms rather than the characteristics of a technological-industrial apparatus and instrumental rationality ( Pellicani, 1998). Thus, for Pellicani the Holocaust is best viewed as a reaction against modernity. While Pellicanis argument has been criticized as being an ideological fabrication (Delni and Piccone, 1998), other commentators have taken a middle position. For example, Freeman, while not disagreeing with Baumans characterization of modernity, suggests that the institutions of modernity also exert a humanizing inuence ( Freeman, 1995, p. 210). This ambivalence regarding the institutions of modernity is also present in the discussions regarding the role of bureaucracy. Once again Pellicani puts the argument most forcefully when he distinguishes between strong-form and weak-form arguments regarding the role of bureaucracy i.e. was genocide a product of bureaucracy (the strong-form) or was bureaucracy simply indispensable (the weak-form) (Pellicani, 1998, p. 4)? While we do not nd this distinction particularly useful, the suggestions that bureaucratic practices are ambivalent (du Gay, 1999) and that counter-balancing forces usually exist within the institutions of modernity are provocative (OKane, 1997). For example, du Gay states that we need to examine the working of bureaucratic

mechanisms, in particular, historical-political contexts to understand the role and functioning of such mechanisms ( p. 581). And OKane proposes that, in non-wartime periods, the other institutions of civil society will mitigate against the potential excesses of bureaucratic practices (Joas, 1998). In the case study that follows, we return to these themes. In explaining what differentiates the Holocaust from prior genocides, Bauman emphasizes the social engineering aspects. In his discussion of Bauman, Zipes comments that there were numerous instances of mass slaughter, pogroms, and genocide in the past but they were not calculating planned and carried through in the name of progress or a better society (Zipes, 1991, p. 173). Likewise, Rubenstein (1978, pp. 6-7) says that the Holocaust was the rst attempt by a modern, legally constituted government to pursue a policy of bureaucratically organized genocide both within and beyond its frontiers. Freeman, however, disagrees with this conclusion suggesting that previous genocides were also goal-directed and that genocidal social engineering has a long history (Freeman, 1995, p. 222). However, Freeman concurs with the suggestion that modern-day technologies make such genocides more efcient and destructive. Furthermore, it is the distancing aspects of current-day techniques that make genocide possible. Previous practitioners of genocide:
. . . celebrated their killings. Modern culture, in the face of genocide, is weak, vacillating, collaborationist, shocked, guilty and ineffectually humanitarian ( p. 222).

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Freemans comment on modern cultures reaction to genocide forms an interesting contrast with modern bureaucracys power to effect the genocide. These critiques and responses are important to the current study. On one level, they provide a degree of conceptual precision regarding Baumans arguments, highlighting the potential connections among modernity, bureaucratic practices and genocidal outcomes. At the same time, the critiques and responses make visible the ambivalence of the practices and discourses of this epoch. This ambivalence is present in the discussions of bureaucratic practices as both enabling and mitigating the potential for genocidal actions. It is also present in the tensions between the notions of a gardening state and discourses of humanism. For example, Freemans comments hint at how the term genocide and holocaust are a contested terrain, precisely because such activities are contrary to our humanist ethos. Bauman himself recognized that such terms have political value resulting in debate over what counts as genocide (Andreopoulos, 1994; Chalk, 1994; Charny, 1994). However, his response was to focus on the processes rather than the politics of denitions ( p. xiii). Finally, this prior work emphasizes the importance of understanding the functioning of techniques such as accounting within a specic empirical setting. As the subsequent case analysis illustrates, the role of accounting in mediating federal government-indigenous peoples relations in Canada at the beginning of the 20th century exhibited similarities to, but also important differences from, the Holocaust. The preceding discussion has emphasized the roles played by administrative structures and techniques such as accounting in creating the conditions of possibility for the holocausts of modernity. However, it is also important to consider the role played by individual agency within these structures. On the one hand, the role of agency must not be overstated: a destructive process is not the work of a few mad minds. It is far too complex in its organizational build-up and far too pervasive in its

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administrative implementation (Hilberg, 1985). Yet on the other hand, key individuals do exercise agency within such administrative structures. These individuals design the administrative programs and technologies that other civil servants implement (Funnel, 1998, p. 457). These individuals create the systems that subsequently enlist those others, in a vast bureaucratic organization, who kill from behind a desk without wielding weapons more lethal than a typewriter (Milchman and Rosenberg, 1992, p. 215). These individuals are the essential individuals within these processes yet who are they? One should not assume that a man who may have been an essential individual in the destructive operations is instantaneously recognizable (Friedlander and Milton, 1980, p. 99). Our analysis identies Scott, a poet sitting behind the desk of an accountant, as one of the architects of governmental policies. D.C. Scott and the Canadian Indian Department Method and sources The analysis that follows is based upon our reading and interpretation of the following archival documents, relevant legislation, annual reports of the Department of Indian Affairs along with secondary sources. In terms of archival documents, the National Archive of Canada contains a series of microlms (RG10 Series, Volumes 1130-1133 & 6812, Reels 8535, 9007-9009) pertaining to the operation of the Canadian Indian Department during Scotts tenure (Gillis et al., 1975, Public Archives of Canada, 1977). These microlms contain the private and general letter books of Scott along with speeches and papers that he presented. The annotated Indian Act (Venne, 1981) provided a summary of the changes to the Indian Act over this time period whereas the Annual Reports for this department between 1880 and 1940 provided a record of the Departments construction of important events and activities. This primary archival material was supplemented with secondary histories on the operation of the Indian Department during this time period (Getty et al., 1983; Miller, 1996; Milloy, 1999; Titley, 1986;) as well as works pertaining to Scott the poet laureate (Scott and Bourinot, 1960; Scott et al., 1983). The accountant and the poet an overview Duncan Campbell Scott began his career in the Department of Indian Affairs at the age of 17 as a copy clerk. This was in 1879, and over the next 34 years he worked his way up to the highest civil service post in the department. He held, at various times, the posts of Clerk in charge of the Accountants Branch, Chief Clerk and Accountant, negotiator of Treaty 9, Superintendent of Indian Education, and nally Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs. In this last position, held by Scott until 1932, his immediate superior was the Superintendent General, a cabinet post. The career of Scott at the Indian Department lasted 53 years, a duration sufcient to turn him into a prototypical civil servant. While this alone would account for much of the tenor of his policies and programs, throughout his career Scott was intimately involved with the departments accounting systems and mechanisms. We suggest that Scotts command of these accounting systems was inseparable from his bureaucratic methods. The accounting technologies he deployed were the basic tools of his ofce. And while we do not mean to suggest that Scott operated with any sort of direct control that would negate either the agency of other members of the department, or contradict what we know about the indirect forms of power and control in bureaucracies

(Perrow, 1986; Weber and Andreski, 1983, Weber and Swedberg, 1999) we nonetheless assert that accounting technologies were both salient and very effective for Scott. At the time of Scotts initial appointment, for example, the Department was operating according to the dictates of the Indian Act of 1876, which had placed aboriginal people in a distinct legal category as wards of the government. Both reserve lands and the proceeds of any land sales were held in trust for aboriginal people by the government, making accounting central to the execution of Indian Department policies right from the beginning of Scotts career. These policies were directed towards the ultimate goal of assimilation. For instance, the Indian Act (Sections 89-94) provided for the extension of the franchise to aboriginal people, but only on the condition that they relinquished their Indian status. The Act, thus, stripped enfranchised Indians of one legal status, but failed to create the conditions under which they could ourish in their new one. Instead, it only subjected them to the yoke of a bureaucracy and the increasing powers of the Superintendent General (Scott et al., 1983; Titley, 1986, p. 13). While Scott spent his entire working life within this bureaucracy, for many members of Ottawas elite he was not known as a bureaucrat. Rather, he was considered a musician, an esteemed member of the Royal Society of Canada, and a highly regarded poet known especially for his sympathetic literary treatment of aborigines. This perception continues in the Canadian literary world, where one fairly recent work referred to Scott as poet and short-story writer, sometime bureaucrat. . . (Scott et al., 1983, p. 1, emphasis added). References to Scotts government work tend to assume that he was as sympathetic to First Nations in his bureaucratic role as he is interpreted ( by some) to be in his poetry ( Brown, 1944; Salem-Wiseman, 1996). However, recent literary research suggests that Scotts poetry contains references that clearly contradict what would have been common bureaucratic knowledge in the Indian Department ( Monture, 2001), suggesting that the link between Scotts poetic and bureaucratic lives is not straightforward. Passion, order and accounting controls In the poetry of Scott, passion and order compete with each other, not as complements but as mutual antitheses. Passion is associated with the savage and the wild, order with culture and reason. The European world is considered civilized. In contrast, the aboriginal world is not only savage, but sensual and even hateful and murderous:
Making great medicine In memory of hated things dead Or in menace of hated things to come Powassans Drum (Scott, 1926, p. 59) She stands full-throated and with careless pose, This woman of a weird and waning race The Onondaga Madonna (Scott, 1926, p. 230) When the tired sentry stooped above the rill, Her long knife ashed, and hissed, and drank its ll Watkwenies (Scott, 1926, p. 230)

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These examples, it might be argued, raise interesting personal questions about Scott, but for the current study the importance lies in the link between these attitudes towards the aboriginal world and Scotts role as an Indian Department bureaucrat.

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Scott viewed nature as subordinate to humanity, something to be subdued by civilization. He also saw the aborigine as part of this natural world, and therefore, as something to be subdued and absorbed into civilization, to be governed and restrained by the policies and programs of his ofce. In fact, control and restraint dominated Scotts policies and bureaucratic initiatives, marking his dealings with departmental subordinates no less than his intentions towards the First Nations. Over the course of his tenure in the Indian Department, there was both a retrenchment of authority away from the dispersed eld ofces to the Indian Department bureaucracy in Ottawa and an increasing pattern of control via spending restraints. For example, around the time that Scott was promoted to Chief Accountant, the decision was made to institute a program of spending restraint as a way of curbing the unexpected expenditures that resulted from the signing of the western treaties and the simultaneous devastation of the buffalo on the prairies. In contrast to later initiatives introduced by Scott, this rst spending restraint program concentrated on non-targeted across-the-board spending reductions. Salaries of agents, clerks and farming instructors were unilaterally decreased by approximately 30 per cent (Titley, 1986, p. 17). One of the consequences of these administrative changes was the centralization of authority in Ottawa which, in turn, increased the inuence of Scott. Titley comments that, although Scott did not have much experience dealing directly with indigenous peoples, he shared his superiors concern that expenses be minimized ( p. 17). Thus, the notion of restraint became an underlying departmental philosophy over the next 40 years with the continual upward ratcheting of the modes of restraint. This philosophy is nicely captured in the 1908 Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs:
When the Indians of Manitoba and the west came into treaty relations with the government the task which confronted the government was that of converting helpless and ignorant savages into civilized and industrious members of the commonwealth. The policy adopted was that of affording just sufcient help necessary to enable the Indians to help themselves. In the earlier years the cost of doing this was necessarily very considerable, and as recently as twenty years ago the destitute vote for the year aggregated some $372,000. Ten years ago, i.e. by the year 1897-8 this had been reduced to $182,700 or to something but little short of one-half. For the past year, viz., 1907-8, a further reduction of the vote to $143,000 had been effected notwithstanding the inclusion of the requirements of some 10,000 Indians in their aboriginal condition, recently brought under the governments direct care by the formation of Treaty No. 8 (Department of Indian Affairs, 1880-1940, p. xx).

In his subsequent reections on these policies, Scott comments that these policies were a method of encouraging self-dependence, a way of weaning indigenous peoples off government assistance (Scott, 1914, p. 601). He saw these policies as a type of benevolence in that the Indian Department did what was best for indigenous peoples rather than simply following the strict dictates of the treaties:
As may be surmised from the record of past Indian administration, the government was always anxious to fulll the obligations which were laid upon it by these treaties . . . It has discharged them in a spirit of generosity, rather with reference to the policy of advancement which was long ago inaugurated in Upper Canada than in a niggardly spirit as if the treaty stipulations were to be weighed with exactitude (Scott, 1914, p. 600).

As in Scotts poetry (Dragland, 1974), restraint was viewed as a positive quality that government policy should seek to inculcate within indigenous peoples. And in keeping

with Foucaults comments regarding governmentality, the ultimate aim of such policies was to not only change the behaviours and customs of individuals but also to change them so that external government was unnecessary in short, to make them self-disciplining (1991). When Scott became Deputy Superintendent in 1913, the notion of spending restraint once again became a priority. However, this time, restraint plus accountability became the watchword for departmental operations:
This growing and cumbersome bureaucracy was making increasing demands on the public purse, a tendency Scott had attempted to discourage while serving as the departments accountant. Now that he was in charge, nancial restraint became all the more evident. Shortly after his promotion to deputy superintendent, Scott made clear a renewed emphasis on accountability and spending restraint. On 25 October 1913, he sent a circular to all agents for the purpose of assisting them in the efcient management of their agencies (Titley, 1986, p. 38).

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Under this new regime of accountability, agents were required to maintain scrupulous accounts and to provide justication for the expenditure of Departmental funds. Throughout Scotts time in the Department of Indian Affairs, the dichotomy between passion and order was a subtext of departmental operations. As in Scotts poetry, aborigines were constructed as part of the untamed nature. Departmental initiatives were understood as necessary to allow aborigines to realize their potential. Reminiscent of the 1830s ( Neu, 2000a), Scott instructed his Indian Agents to encourage habits of industry and thrift as a way of curbing their nomadic passions (Titley, 1986, p. 38). But in keeping with his emphasis on economy and accountability, Agents were requested to encourage such habits but to minimize the expense to the Department (by spending band funds if at all possible) and to keep accurate accounts and to justify every penny ( p. 38). Scotts discussion of an ideal land surrender gives voice to his views regarding how bureaucratic mechanisms could curb passion and introduce order to aborigines:
The surrender of a portion of the Blackfoot reserve in Alberta may be analysed as a case in point to show how Indians may be advised to make a prudent use of their estate. On June 18, 1910, 115,000 acres of the Blackfoot reserve were surrendered. The total amount of the sale was not to be less than $1,600,000. This amount was to be divided into three funds. The sum of $50,000 was to be set aside for the purpose of purchasing [agricultural implements] to permit them to begin farming. The amount expended for each Indian is to be paid back and credited to the fund within six years, from the proceeds of the sale of his harvest. The sum of $350,000 was to be expended within ve years in the interests of the reserve in general. One hundred and sixty cottages were to be erected and furniture was to be supplied; one hundred stables and two buildings in which to house machinery were also to be built. Two complete agricultural motors, gang ploughs, grain separators and farm machinery were to be purchased. This fund was to be used to pay the cost of boring wells and also to defray the expenses of seed grain and grass seed, and general repairs to roads, culverts and fences. The residue from the sale of the land was to be capitalized. The interest accruing from this capital, together with the interest on any deferred payments on surrendered land, was to be used to defray the expenses of operating the agricultural motors to meet such general expenses as should be in the interest of the band, and to pay the cost of blankets and food for the aged and inform as well as a regular weekly ration to all members of the band. In this surrender, as will be observed, no cash is to be distributed to the Indians, and the whole expenditure is dened and controlled. (Scott, 1914, p. 605, emphasis added)

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This passage is important because it documents how Scott, the accountant, thought about the problems of government associated with the Indian Department. As the passage highlights, the proper structuring of nancial transactions would encourage changed habits and patterns of behaviour. Through the attention to nancial details i.e. how many funds to set up, what the monies would be used for, what monies would be treated as capital and what as interest, and so on Scott believed it possible to introduce order. Furthermore, it is clear that he viewed such nancial structures as a form of restraint; the ideal surrender is one where no cash is to be distributed to the Indians but rather the whole expenditure is dened and controlled. The aforementioned spending constraints and accountability mechanisms exemplify a type of nancial rationality. It was through these mechanisms that Scott sought to introduce order and to inculcate certain patterns of behaviour among both Indian Department employees and their charges. As the preceding quotation hints at, nancial mechanisms were akin to chess pieces they were deployed and moved by Scott in the attempt to foreclose certain behavioural possibilities and to encourage others in the attempt to encourage progress. In this sense, these techniques not only helped to make operable a form of nancial rationality (Miller and OLeary, 1993, p. 189) but also served to construct the eld of indigenous peoples as a eld where nancial rationality was the appropriate mode of rationality. As a consequence, both problems and potential solutions were viewed from this particular vantage point (Preston et al., 1997). In constructing nancial rationality as the appropriate form of rationality within the eld, we observe a crowding-out of alternative discourses and rationalities. Much like Baumans comments regarding bureaucratic practices, the effect of Scotts usage of accounting technique was to downplay moral considerations that were inconsistent with his framing of events. This is not to say that Scott did not construct his actions as moral. Scotts goal of civilizing the savages, as he often called them in his correspondence and even in his Departments annual reports[3] (Department of Indian Affairs, 1880-1940, p. xx), was rmly grounded in his belief that he was pursuing the good of the First Nations. And while he was a Christian, and referred to native spirituality as paganism in his poems (e.g., The Onondaga Madonna, line 4), the overriding goal of his Departmental programs and initiatives was not religious evangelism but an extension of civilization to a race of people whose time, he believed, had run out. Thus, the moral basis of Scotts leadership was not in conict with his administrative agenda. However, explicit morality is relegated to his personal correspondence and to his public justications of what he was doing. Within the administrative and accounting realm of Scott, in the day-to-day workings of the Department, the calculus of cost and control supplanted the expression of other rationalities. In part, this crowding-out was a consequence of the positioning of Scott within the eld and his ability to name and dene appropriate modes of behaviour (Bourdieu and Thompson, 1992). Because of Scotts position and because of more generalized concerns regarding cost within the Indian Department ( McNab, 1983), the conditions of possibility existed for the introduction of such accounting mechanisms. In this sense, Scott was an essential individual ( Friedlander and Milton, 1980) within the bureaucratic apparatuses of the time. Furthermore, the introduced accounting practices not only had the discursive effect of privileging certain ways of knowing but

also they circumvented agency on the part of indigenous peoples. As the above quotation highlights through structures, Scott thought that it was possible to restrain and circumvent agency indeed, this was the objective behind the introduction of the specic accounting mechanisms. Action from a distance The structures and techniques implemented by Scott not only worked by privileging a specic form of rationality. They also permitted action from a distance (Preston and Oakes, 2001), the capability of a those at the centre of a far-ung bureaucracy to coordinate the activities of subordinates, and to manage behaviours within the aboriginal population. Legislation initiated by Scott contained nancial incentives and penalties that helped ensure compliance in distant parts of the country where direct supervision was impossible. Such legislation helped to abstract the aboriginal population, converting individuals into numbers that were then aggregated and transmitted to the centre. There, the bureaucrat could deal with numbers, insulated from the human impact of any resulting decisions. The individual aboriginal human being was, thus, reduced to the conceptual Indian. This abstraction or distancing echoed Scotts Victorian poetry, in which Indians were romanticized as a subset of Nature, a nature quite inferior to civilization. Amendments to the Indian Act were introduced by Scott in 1910, 1924 and 1927. These changes increased the control of the Department over funds belonging to Indian bands. The 1910 amendment, for instance, stipulated that:
No contract or agreement binding. . . made either by the chiefs or councilors of any band . . . other than and except as authorized by and for the purposes of this Part of the Act, shall be valid or of any force or effect unless and until it has been approved in writing by the Superintendent General (SC 1910 c. 28, s. 2).

Accounting and the holocausts of modernity 589

The 1924 amendment gave the Indian Department access to band funds for capital projects that would promote progress (SC 1924 c. 47 s. 5). The same year, Scott proposed further amendments to the Act. He wanted to prohibit lawyers and other agitators from collecting money from Indians for the pursuit of claims against the government without departmental approval (Titley, 1986, p. 59). In the 1927 amendment to the Act, his proposal was adopted. Similar amendments were introduced to enhance Department control over indigenous lands. In 1911, amendments to the Indian Act gave the Department the authority to expropriate indigenous lands for public works, such as railway construction, and for the expedience of towns that contained or adjoined reserve land. In the words of the amended Act, a judicial inquiry could be requested to determine if it is expedient, having regard to the interest of the public and of the Indians of the band for whose use the reserve is held, that the Indians should be removed from the reserve . . . (SC 1911, c. 14, s. 2.). These amendments gave the Indian Department substantial inuence, and often direct control, over how Indian bands could spend their money, and increased the ability of the Department to determine when and at what price First Nations lands would be expropriated. The combined nancial and legislative mechanisms greatly extended the control that could be exercised from Ottawa, circumscribing the agency of both the Indian Department agents in the eld, and the aborigines themselves.

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And as the 1927 amendment highlights, any expenditures by a Band for the purpose of challenging the governments control were expressly prohibited by the Act. The ofcial administrative correspondence of Scott for this period hints at the power of the bureaucratic machinery of the Indian Department. Much of the correspondence relates to routine administrative events such as salaries, and the hiring and ring of administrative staff. However, the material dealing with requests for the surrender and sale of indigenous lands and requests to depose chiefs and councilors is powerful in both its repetitive and its perfunctory nature. For example, correspondence pertaining to land expropriations took the following form:
The undersigned has the honour to report that the Pacic Great Eastern Railway Company has applied to the Department of Indian Affairs for the purchase of 68.3 acres more or less for right of way on the Pavilion Indian Reservation . . . The land has been valued by a competent valuator as follows . . . The undersigned would recommend that under Section 46 of the Indian Act as amended by Section 1, Chap. 14, 1-2 Geo. V, authority by given for the sale by the Department of Indian Affairs of the above mentioned 68.3 acres (Public Archives of Canada, 1977, 16 July 1914).

Correspondence pertaining to removals stated:

The undersigned begs to report that repeated complaints have been received by the Department of Indian Affairs from the Indian Agent for the Edmonton Agency with regard to Louis Callihoos conduct as chief of the Michels band, in the said agency. . . The undersigned would therefore recommend that under section 96 of the Indian Act Louis Callihoo be deposed from the ofce of chief of Michels band, on the ground of incompetency (Public Archives of Canada, 1977, 29 March 1916).

Although it is difcult to tell precisely from the correspondence whether requests to expropriate land or depose hereditary chiefs were ever denied, this archival material evokes a bureaucratic machine slowly and inexorably rolling over a population in serious decline. This ofcial correspondence resonates with Baumans comments regarding the efciency of administrative apparatuses in making government policies operable (Bauman, 1989, p. 98). Once the appropriate legislation had been introduced (thereby creating the possibility for the federal government to expropriate land when and where necessary), administrative apparatuses turned this possibility into a reality. As the correspondence seems to indicate, requests for the expropriation of land and the deposal of chiefs followed certain procedures. But in the end, both the form-letter nature of the nal approval and the number of these approvals suggest a routinized process whereby the nal outcome is never in doubt. This focus on the micro tasks of the approval process crowds out consideration of the larger issues (Bauman, 1989, p. 100). Bureaucratic control over Indian land and money were, for Scott, merely temporary means towards a nal solution. Testifying in support of Bill 14, in March 1920, Scott said:
I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that this country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone. That is my whole point. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department and that is the whole object of this Bill (quoted in Titley, 1986, p. 50).

The gradual elimination of First Nations preoccupied the Indian Department under Scott. While various initiatives at the legislative and administrative levels, noted above, undermined the ability of bands to control their land and money, the Department continued its attempts to get rid of the Indian problem at the level of the individual. By tinkering with the legal denition of Indian status, and setting up conditions under which an indigenous person would lose that status, federal legislation encouraged and enforced the gradual civilization of the native population. In 1919, for example, the Indian Act was amended to read: Any Indian women who marries any person other than an Indian, or a non-treaty Indian, shall cease to be an Indian in every respect within the meaning of this Act . . . (SC 1919-20, C. 50, s. 2). Bill 14, however, went much further than any previous legislation. The purpose of the bill was compulsory enfranchisement. While previous legislation permitted individual aborigines to be given the vote upon fullling particular conditions, Bill 14 allowed for the enfranchisement of an Indian against his will following a report by a person appointed by the Superintendent General on his suitability (Titley, 1986, p. 49). Since the Superintendent General was a cabinet post whose incumbent could change with swings in political fortune (Titley, 1986, pp. 48-49), the bill effectively increased the inuence of the leading civil servant, Scott, who would be responsible for preparing, or overseeing the preparation of, the requisite reports on suitability. These procedures and policies reveal that to get rid of the Indian problem meant nothing less than to get rid of the Indians, culturally and racially. Culturally, the technologies of settlement and agriculture, supported by accounting techniques that undermined agency and ensured the effectiveness of Departmental controls, separated the First Nations from their hunting territory and thus from their way of life. Racially, initiatives like marriage with non-Indians and compulsory enfranchisement stripped aborigines of both their genetic heritage and their legal status. Thus, in the broad-stroke records of legislative changes and in the minutiae of archival administrative traces, we observe the construction and operation of an administrative apparatus of devastating capability. This machine operated much of the time quite gradually and slowly, yet it was able to expropriate land and strip away legal status with relentless efciency. Encouraging certain actions from a distance, all the while buffering administrators such as Scott from observing the consequences of their initiatives,[4] this bureaucratic device was the means towards Canadas own nal solution. Civilized solutions While the bureaucratic tools of Scotts Indian Department were means towards an end, it is important to recognize that the goal of cultural and racial erasure was itself part of a broader Canadian social objective. Bauman (1989) states that in the modern world, the world that Canada was entering during Scotts tenure, genocide is not conducted for its own sake. Rather, genocide is:
. . . a necessity that stems from the ultimate objective . . . The end itself is a grand vision of a better, and radically different, society. Modern genocide is an element of social engineering, meant to bring out a social order conforming to the design of the perfect society ( p. 91).

Accounting and the holocausts of modernity 591

Invariably, says Bauman, there is an aesthetic dimension to the design: the ideal world about to be built conforms to the standards of superior beauty. In describing the

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Holocaust as an product of modernity, Bauman uses the metaphor of a garden to represent the planned society. In such a garden, weeds must die not so much because of what they are, as because of what the beautiful, orderly garden ought to be ( p. 92). The development of residential schooling in Canada after confederation epitomizes the cultivation of such an ultimate objective. Prior to confederation, missionary societies had been involved in education and missionary work involving indigenous peoples. The involvement of missionary societies in educational activities along with the active lobbying of missionary societies, encouraged the federal government which was responsible for aboriginal education to utilize missionary societies in the provision of aboriginal education. With the federal government providing the funds for residential schools, the missionary societies were quick to seize the opportunity to utilize state subsidies to expand their sphere of operations (Titley, 1986, p. 76). The churches built the schools and then turned to the federal government for funding. By the end of the 1800s, there were 290 schools in operation with 104 operated by the Roman Catholic Church, 93 by the Church of England, 40 by Methodists, 13 by Presbyterians and 40 undenominational (Department of Indian Affairs, 1902). Departmental rationales for the development of residential schools, whereby aboriginal students would be isolated from their families and community, had much in common with Baumans weeds-in-the garden metaphor. Education was seen as a method of inducing pacication, an indispensible element in the creation of conditions for the peaceful occupation of the west(Milloy, 1999, p. 32)[5]. When he was Superintendent of Indian Education, Scott commented that without education and with neglect the Indians would produce an undesirable and often dangerous element in society (quoted in Milloy, 1999, p. 33).[6] Residential schools were envisioned as a circle of civilized conditions where one culture would be replaced with another through the actions of the teacher teaching a set curriculum a curriculum which emphasized European virtues and knowledges ( pp. 34-35). Thus, residential schools would transform aboriginal youth from weeds in the garden into owers, whereas the lodgepole Indians who were untrainable would be contained on the reservations. As Scott comments, through such mechanisms it would be possible to overcome the lingering traces of native custom and tradition:
. . . the happiest future for the Indian Race is absorption into the general population, and this is the object of the policy of our government. The great forces of intermarriage and education will nally overcome the lingering traces of native custom and tradition (Scott, 1914, p. 599).

If this was the plan, Miller and Roses (1990) comment that governmentality is eternally optimistic but perpetually failing seems correct. By the early 1890s there was concern about the mounting nancial expenditures and the ambiguity of government-church relations in the area of residential schooling. These concerns encouraged the Department to introduce a series of rules that were meant to introduce order and economy into the system.
In October 1892, through an order-in-council, the government initiated a general nancial system for the schools. Thereafter, so as to relieve the pressure of present expenditure, the funding of all schools boarding and industrial would be by that correct principle because the Minister considers that when the whole cost of an Institution is directly borne by the Government the same economy by those in immediate charge is not used as would be employed under other conditions (Milloy, 1999, p. 62).

The new system was seen as a tool to restrain the nancial expenditures of the missionary societies and thus nancial obligations of the Department: they were for the close control of the per capita allowance placed in the hands of the various religious denominations (Milloy, 1999, p. 65). The orders-in-council set a per capita funding rate (which was below then-current levels of expenditure) and stipulated that most charges were to be paid out of this except for books and appliances and the cost of building repairs, which would be borne by the government ( p. 63). However, the new system of nancial controls did not fare any better than the previous one. The order-in-councils themselves were weak in that the Department had no control over maintenance expenditures nor any sense of the associated costs until the repair bills were received (Milloy, 1999, p. 64). Furthermore, the churches refused to be bound by the terms of the orders and continued to operate as always ( p. 65). And because of the political clout of the churches, the Department continued to accept full nancial responsibility for expenditures ( p. 65). This as well as the failure of the schools in the area of assimilation led Scott himself to conclude that, the governments attempt between 1892 and 1894 to bring order, Departmental authority, economy and nancial control to the system was . . .a total failure ( p. 65). The system of nancial controls introduced in the late 1880s did remove the weeds from the garden but did not succeed in transforming them into owers. The inadequate per capita funding amount encouraged school operators to concentrate on the recruiting and retention of students regardless of their physical health (Milloy, 1999, p. 67). Within the Department it was well known that schools routinely admitted unhealthy students without any medical check ( p. 88) and although the 1892/1894 Order in Councils stipulated that (a) a medical certicate was a condition of admission and (b) that the Department could inspect the schools, there was no regular inspection ( p. 89). This intersection of an inadequate funding mechanism, the lack of enforcement of Departmental rules along with substandard facilities created intolerable living conditions:
The method of funding the individual schools, the intricacies of the Department-church partnership in nancing and managing schools and the failure of the Department to exercise effective oversight of the schools, led directly to their rapid deterioration and overcrowding. Those were the conditions within which, as in urban slums of the time, tubercular disease became endemic (Milloy, 1999, p. 52).

Accounting and the holocausts of modernity 593

The convergence of nancial concerns and health concerns encouraged Scott to once again revamp the nancial controls shortly after he became the Superintendent of Indian Education in 1909. Around 1905 the Department was forced to bail-out several schools because of their accumulated debts resulting in part from nancial mismanagement (Titley, 1986, p. 82). Around this same time, Dr Bryce, the medical inspector to the department of the interior, examined the state of health within industrial and boarding schools on the prairies ( p. 83). His report became national news when he documented not only the appalling conditions in residential schools but how approximately 24 per cent of students died while in attendance and another 18 per cent shortly after leaving the schools as a result of illness (Milloy, 1999, p. 91). Together these two events provided the impetus for Scott to suggest the need to reconstruct the whole school system (Titley, 1986, p. 82). While Bryces report contained specic recommendations for improving the conditions of residential schools, Scott vetoed these because of cost considerations

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(Titley, 1986, p. 85). Instead, Scotts solution was administrative and accounting-based. He emphasized better screening of students entering (even though the previous orders contained such provisions) and funding revisions to encourage better maintenance of facilities (Milloy, 1999, p. 94), along with caps on student enrolment based on facility size. For example, differential per capita funding rates were provided depending on the quality of the facilities. The presumption was that operators of low-grade facilities would have incentives to upgrade the facilities to receive higher funding levels. The preceding history of residential schooling is interesting for several reasons. On one level, it calls attention to the inter-relationships among policy objectives and bureaucratic methods that Bauman (1989) talks about. Like previous sections, we observe the increasing importance of nancial rationalities within this particular sphere and the crowding out of other rationalities and considerations. Initially, one of the objectives of residential schooling was assimilation, with a government-funded and church-run system as the chosen method of translation. This method of translation reected prevailing societal and bureaucratic beliefs that assimilation could be achieved through a combination of religious instruction, education and the isolation of aboriginal youth from their communities. However, by the early 1890s the opinions of Scott, other senior bureaucrats and politicians had shifted slightly: the excess costs of the 1880s suggested that it was necessary to govern not only aborigines but also the churches. Thus, given Scotts accounting background, nancial regulations and controls seemed to be an appropriate way to exercise such control from a distance. One of the consequences of such framings is that macro policy objectives are often expressed in numerical micro-level statements (Bauman, 1989, p. 102). In the case of Nazi Germany, bureaucrats were concerned with the cost per kilometer of transporting human cargo ( p. 101). For the Indian Department, the policy of assimilation could be expressed as minimizing the percentage of the aboriginal population that deviated from the norms of settler society in a cost-effective manner. The public statements of Scott were not this explicit. However, comments such as the happiest future for the Indian Race is absorption into the general population and our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic give voice to this sentiment. Furthermore, while it is impossible to assess intentionality, it is important to acknowledge that high mortality rates are not inconsistent with an objective of decreasing the percentage of aboriginal peoples who deviate from the norms of settler society. Thus, while Victorian sensibilities may have precluded direct annihilation (Freeman, 1995), genocide through indifference or for a lack of funds was perhaps acceptable. The conclusion that the use of such techniques may have resulted in genocide through indifference is provocative. For example, in her critique of Bauman, OKane (1997) argues that in non-wartime situations, civil society and other institutions will mitigate the potential dysfunctional consequences associated with instrumental rationality and bureaucratic mechanisms. However, this case illustrates that this is not necessarily the case, especially when the civilizing tendencies of the state are consistent with the zeitgeist of the times. Social engineering was an accepted practice at this juncture indigenous peoples along with the mentally and physically disabled were all acceptable targets for the interventionist Canadian state that, through dividing practices (Foucault, 1984), sought to separate and sterilize those individuals and groups that were deemed inferior (Dowbiggin, 1997). Thus, instead of providing a

counter-balance, these other institutions and agents provided the technologies that made such dividing practices possible. Following from this last point, the preceding history calls attention to the ways that heterogeneous agents are enlisted in the process of governing (Miller and Rose, 1990). In contrast to the previously discussed accounting and legislative initiatives that maintained a direct relationship between the state and indigenous peoples, the residential schooling example highlights the roles played by indirect agents in social governance (Neu, 2000b). Financial and accounting relations were of continuing importance. However, it was accounting and accountability relations with the missionary societies that were expected to indirectly impact on the eld of concern. In subsequent periods, the expertise of third-party agents such as the medical profession, social workers and corporations was increasingly utilized by the state within this particular sphere (Davis and Zannis, 1973; Churchill, 1994). The politics of the numbers The preceding analysis has emphasized the manner in which accounting solutions came to dominate the activities of the Indian Department during Scotts tenure. However, our analysis would not be complete without acknowledging the politics of the numbers. As Rose (1991) and others acknowledge ( Miller and OLeary, 1993), accounting and other numbers are poly-vocal resources that facilitate governance but also create the possibilities for resistance. During the tenure of Scott, we observe such politicization of the numbers. As the previous section noted, the nancial cost numbers along with the mortality statistics of Dr Bryce encouraged Scott to restructure the nancial controls pertaining to residential schools. Not surprisingly, given both the emphasis within the Department on cost control and Scotts accounting orientation, the revisions emphasized changed nancial controls but no new monies. Yet these responses themselves created the rhetorical space for a politicization of the numbers. In frustration over both the Departments inaction regarding his recommendations and his subsequent dismissal by Scott after Scott became Deputy Superintendent, ex-medical inspector Bryce composed The Story of a National Crime in 1922 ( Bryce, 1922):
He laid the blame for the continuing death of children after 1907 squarely on the shoulders of the dominating inuence, Duncan Campbell Scott, who had become the reactionary Deputy Superintendent General in 1913 and prevented even the simplest efforts to deal with the health problem of the Indians along modern scientic lines. He went on to charge: owing to Scotts active opposition,. . . no action was taken by the Department to give effect to the recommendations made in the 1911 contracts. (Milloy, 1999, p. 95)

Accounting and the holocausts of modernity 595

In this exchange, we observe a contest not only between humanitarian and bureaucratic sentiment, but over which numbers should be privileged: medical numbers that signify the physical health of the indigenous population or nancial numbers that signify the scal health of the Indian Department. This juxtaposition of competing numbers highlights the sometimes overlapping and sometimes competing vantage points of the different disciplinary knowledges that are enlisted in the act of governing. While Scotts entrenched position within the eld allowed him and the Indian Department to weather the criticisms of Bryce, Scotts subsequent initiatives suggested

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that he was sensitive to the politics of the numbers, both in terms of the type of criticism offered by Bryce and also the criticism that the Indian Department was not cost effective. For example, following his promotion to Deputy Superintendent in 1913, Scott revamped the annual report to more clearly show the results of Departmental activities:
An attempt has been made to render the report of greater practical value by re-arrangement and consolidation . . . The form of the statements has been revised, and a series of tables is presented, designed to show in a clear way the results of the various activities engaged in by the Indians (Department of Indian Affairs, 1915).

596

Subsequent annual reports contained statistical tables on aboriginal population, the value of crops under cultivation, the value of real property and total income along with statistics on the number of schools in operation and the number of students. Likewise, the annual reports also sought to counter concerns regarding not only the degree of control that the Department was exercising over residential schools but also the condition of the schools themselves. For example, the 1915 Annual Report states that:
In Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories the schools are inspected by the inspectors of the different Indian agencies; regular visits are made, and reports submitted to the department. In addition to this inspection, almost all the schools are under the direct supervision of the different Indian agents, who are required to make monthly inspections and reports ( p. xxiii).

whereas, the 1916 Annual Report comments that:

In our residential schools special attention is given to all that pertains to healthy living. Calisthenics is practised and the benets of fresh air and personal cleanliness are carefully impressed upon the children; the instruction which they thus received cannot fail to inuence their later life upon the reserves ( p. xxiii).

Foreshadowing the disclosure management activities of modern day corporations, the annual reports for the Department of Indian affairs sought to inuence how relevant public know and feel about the activities of the Indian Department and their charges (Preston et al., 1996). The politicization of the numbers implicit in the above events hint at a changed positioning regarding accounting technologies. While on the surface the challenge to accounting numbers by medical numbers did not result in immediate changes in administrative practice, the resulting politicization made visible the competing rationalities and expert knowledges that were at play within the eld. And through these interchanges, public policy was, in the words of Rose, being gured out (Rose, 1991). Undoubtedly, the decision to use subsequent annual report disclosures was an attempt to manage these challenges from within the frame of nancial rationality. Yet to conclude that it was simply an impression that the management misses the point. The fact that the numbers were politicized and that the ability of nancial numbers to represent the eld was being challenged, at some level ensured that policy-makers such as Scott could no long bracket these competing vantage points. This nal point gives us a complete understanding of whether bureaucratic practices, such as accounting, provide the conditions of possibility for the holocausts of modernity. The initial parts of our analysis highlighted how nancial rationalities had

come to crowd out other vantage points within this particular sphere, how technologies of accounting and law were intertwined in these processes, and how governance was operationalized in diverse sites via heterogeneous agents. Based on this analysis, we proposed that the empirical material challenged OKanes (1997) assertion that the institutions of civil society mitigate against the excesses of bureaucracy. We found such general mitigation especially unlikely when programmatic societal discourses are consistent with the policy-making aims of the state. This being said, accounting numbers become politicized as a result of specic challenges either by challenges to the accounting numbers themselves (Arnold and Hammond, 1994) or by the juxtaposition of other sets of numbers based on differing rationalities and differing knowledges. Furthermore, it is through this politicization that these other concerns are smuggled into the policy-making context, thereby potentially mitigating against the excesses envisioned by Bauman. This is not to suggest that these competing knowledges are primarily motivated by moral concerns about bureaucratic policy. Rather, that it is through the processes of contestation and response that alternative viewpoints are assimilated into the bureaucratic apparatuses themselves, thereby mitigating the unidirectional focus of the mechanisms. Thus, whether bureaucratic excesses are contested and mitigated depends on the specic historical conguration of knowledges and institutions involved in the institutional eld under consideration. Discussion This study has provided a history of the present. This history was written with three discrete but overlapping discourses in mind: the study of government-indigenous peoples relations in Canada, the literature on the holocausts of modernity and the accounting literature on governmentality. On one level, this study participates in the continuing scrutiny of government-indigenous peoples relations in Canada, looking specically at the way that techniques of governance were used to encourage action at the distance. The present analysis highlights how accounting and other technologies of governance were directed toward the population of indigenous peoples and sought to inculcate westernized patterns of behaviour. While government policy was often couched in terms such as assimilation and civilization, the analysis illustrates that beneath this veneer of humanism and romanticism were a series of techniques that largely stripped indigenous peoples of their agency and centralized the control of their lives in the Department of Indian Affairs. Thus, the study illuminates the history of present-day government-indigenous peoples relations. It provides insights into why the Canadian government and the Department of Indian and Northern Development (DIAND) continue to be regarded as an intrusive inuence in the lives of indigenous peoples and why government initiatives are viewed with suspicion and distrust. At the same time, this study has inserted itself into the literature and debate regarding the holocausts of modernity. Picking up on the themes outlined by Bauman (1989) as well as those of his critics and commentators, our analysis highlights the need to examine these notions in specic historical settings. For example, our analysis illustrates how the instrumental rationality and distantiation implicit within accounting practices encouraged the crowding out of other vantage points and considerations. In the case of residential schooling, these practices arguably had

Accounting and the holocausts of modernity 597

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genocidal consequences both in terms of the actual in-school mortality rates and in terms of the erasure of indigenous language and practices. Thus, the analysis provides a cautionary note to the assertions of OKane (1997) who proposes that, in non-wartime periods, the countervailing inuence of other institutions will necessarily mitigate against the potential excesses of bureaucratic practices. However, the analysis also proposes that, in certain circumstances, the clash of expert knowledges within governance processes may undermine and mitigate the types of outcomes that Bauman envisions. In this sense, our conclusions resonate with the suggestions of du Gay (1999) who argues against sweeping generalizations, instead suggesting the need to examine the working of specic practices in particular historical-political contexts. Juxtaposing the accounting, legislative and administrative processes of the Indian Department under Scott with Baumans account of the Holocaust, raises several important questions. For example, in both accounts we observe the usage of technologies of government to translate policies into practice, but is it fair to conclude that the end result in the current case was a holocaust? Or were the results more ambivalent? Furthermore, what does the current account indicate about the positioning of accounting within these processes? In terms of the rst two questions, the answer really depends on ones denition of genocide. Some argue that the term genocide should be reserved for those instances of mass extermination (Horowitz, 1991) whereas, others argue that the cultural erasure of a group is equivalent (Barta, 1987; Charny, 1994; Churchill, 1994). Furthermore, this latter group would point to the United Nations denition on genocide, noting that cultural genocide is consistent with this position (Andreopoulos, 1994; Lemkin, 1947). While these denitional debates are not resolvable, the debates bring into sharp relief the similarities and differences in the two cases. For example, we can conclude that both cases involved actions on the part of the state that the majority of the targeted populations would not have consented to in advance. However, greater ambiguity exists in the current case, where for some indigenous individuals, the life envisioned by the federal government for its charges either on reservations or in an enfranchised status may well have been preferable to the other available options. This conclusion does not disregard the imposition of will by governments. Rather it acknowledges the ambivalence that almost always exists within such government programs and initiatives (Rose, 1991, p. 687). Finally, this study is located within the accounting literature on governmentality. Like previous studies in this genre, the present analysis contributes to our understanding of the roles played by accounting in societal governance within a specic empirical setting. In doing so, the analysis illustrates the intersection of different technologies in the act of governing as well as the roles played by heterogeneous agents (i.e. missionary societies) within these processes. However, the analysis also highlights the ambiguity and limitations of accounting within processes of governance, illustrating how accounting practices were intertwined with other technologies of government. Notably, accounting technologies worked in tandem with legislative initiatives, which created the spaces for accounting techniques and inuenced which specic accounting technologies could be used. For example, legislation pertaining to the use of band funds simultaneously provided the impetus for the management of band funds and created the need for further accounting on the part of the Indian Department. Thus, this matrix of technologies was mutually reinforcing

and constitutive. Similar inter-relationships between legislation and accounting were noted by Funnel in his examination of the Holocaust (Funnel, 1998). Accounting, we have proposed, was central to the processes of judging and intervening. As Rose (1991, p. 675) notes, democratic power is calculated power in the sense that numbers are intrinsic to the forms of justication that give legitimacy to political power in democracies. In the present case, accounting numbers regarding costs helped to problematize relations between government and indigenous peoples, and to encourage government intervention. In turn, subsequent accounting numbers regarding spending on aborigines, the number of students in schools, and so forth, allowed judgment of the success of governmental policies. This dialectic of judgment and intervention resulted in a relationship between accounting numbers and government that was reciprocal and mutually constitutive (Rose, 1991, p. 675). However, at the same time these numbers were poly-vocal resources, as the clash of accounting numbers with other statistics resulted in the smuggling in of other vantage points into the policy-making context. While we did not observe any direct challenges to the accounting numbers in this empirical setting, we agree with Arnold and Hammond (1994) that accounting numbers themselves simultaneously provide a mechanism of governance and the conditions of possibility for resistance. These contestations within and between numbers provide a partial explanation for the observation that governance in practice always eludes the optimistic visions of its designers (Miller and Rose, 1990).
Notes 1. Where we refer to government departments, policies and documents, we use the word Indian to match historical usage. However, we have preferred the terms aborigine, aboriginal and First Nations in our own writing. 2. This conception of modernity is consistent with previous accounting research. Gallhofer and Haslam (1995, pp. 204-205) argue that modernity is characterized by a condence in numbers, a quest for certainty, the domination of particularity by universalized subjective reason and techniques of surveillance. Montagna (1997) argues that modernity can be understood as the contest between three autonomous systems the economic, the legal/administrative and the esthetic for dominance in society. This particular formulation is interesting in light of the current studys examination of the conuence of accounting (economic), the Indian Department (legal/administrative) and the poet Scott (esthetic). Baumans metaphor of the gardening state is illustrative of the power of the esthetic in modernity, albeit an extremely rational esthetic. 3. This is not to suggest that Scott personally wrote every part of the Indian Department Annual Report, but that as senior civil servant he would at least have been responsible for the nal wording. 4. Despite his career-long identication with the Indian Department in Ottawa, Scott did have some direct contact with First Nations communities, so he was not entirely buffered from seeing the consequences of his departments policies. As a negotiator of Treaty Nine, he participated in the 1905 and 1906 expeditions to sign the treaty, through what is now northern Ontario. Archival photographs of these trips show that Scott went as part of a large government entourage, with natives doing the paddling. He made a similar trip in 1929-1930 (Industry Canada, 2003). 5. In 1885 around the time of the second Riel rebellion, the Superintendent General commented that with residential schools, the Indians would regard them [their children] as hostages to

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