Critical accounting as an indigenous project

Abstract

We are all indigenous to the planet, our home, ‘earth mother’. In the practices of our hunter gatherer ancestors and Indigenous Communities everywhere, we can glimpse possibilities for human beings to act as reciprocal parts of the environment, actively nurturing our relations with nature and community, as vital to our mental and physical existence. Colonialism, and the roles of accounting within it, mark the beginning of a historical process that has decimated these possibilities, rupturing the bonds and connections that could exist between our environment and us. This history turned land and human labour into ‘objects of barter’ (Marx, 1976), oppressing humanity’s (‘indigenous’) socio-ecological agency, in the Global South, but also in the lands of ‘the colonizers’. A key task for critical accounting is to understand and facilitate the possibilities for all peoples to (re)gain these indigenous potentialities, in all of their plural and myriad forms. Rising to this challenge requires developing debates around decoloniality beyond territorial rivalries over the academic field. It asks us to focus our attention and energies on helping to understand and enact practical social transformations that may be critical to the problem of sustainability. This is therefore not a project to romanticize the past, or exoticize or essentialize certain cultures. Far from being a topic about which only certain people are able to speak, or have an interest, decoloniality as an indigenous project is a struggle for us all, one that has implications for critical accounting research and teaching, and how we think about our role in society.