Hot Off the Shelf: Paying the Land by Joe Sacco

[image description: The book cover of Joe Sacco’s latest book, Paying the Land. The top half is one of his drawings of the Dene people in the wilderness of Canada’s Northwest Territories. The bottom half is one of his drawings of an industrial plant.]
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest opinion. As per usual, I don’t shout out books I don’t love.

Over the Fourth of July, I wasn’t feeling patriotic. To tell you the truth, I never am. I feel like there’s too much the US gets wrong so celebrating with a day of patriotism feels icky to me. In years past I’ve tried to make my blog posts adhere to seasonal and holiday themes, but I decided to opt-out here.

Instead, I spent the long weekend reading Paying the Land by Joe Sacco. Here’s a quick synopsis:

The Dene have lived in the vast Mackenzie River Valley since time immemorial, by their account. To the Dene, the land owns them and it is central to their livelihood and very way of being. But the subarctic Canadian Northwest Territories are home to valuable resources, including oil, gas, and diamonds. With mining came jobs and investment, but also road-building, pipelines, and toxic waste, which scarred the landscape, and alcohol, drugs, and debt, which deformed a way of life.

In Paying the Land, Joe Sacco travels the frozen North to reveal a people in conflict over the costs and benefits of development. Sacco recounts the shattering impact of a residential school system that aimed to “remove the Indian from the child”; the destructive process that drove the Dene from the bush into settlements and turned them into wage laborers; the government land claims stacked against the Dene Nation; and their uphill efforts to revive a wounded culture.

On the surface, it might seem there’s little connection between the Fourth of July in the US and indigenous people in Canada. But when you dig deeper, it makes sense that I’d feel called to read Paying the Land on that particular weekend. One of the many reasons I don’t like celebrating the Fourth is because it feels gross to celebrate a country that was formed in part due to the genocide of its native peoples.

I’ve known about environmental racism in the US for a while and I became particularly aware of it around the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline, which would allow private companies to seize the land of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe for resource extraction. This went against the indigenous community’s wishes, especially since that land is sacred. I knew things like this happened in the US, though I’ve always thought Canada had better sense. (It seems like every time the US does something stupid, people say, “I’ll move to Canada!”) As it turns out, Canada is equally prejudiced against the indigenous people in its country, especially those who live on land they want to develop.

This is such a complicated, multi-faceted issue. Even within the topic of environmental racism as it relates to the Dene people, you have issues around land agreements (who owns what land? what does “owning” land even mean when you’ve lived on the land before deeds and private property were even concepts?), attempts at forced assimilation by the government (residential schools where indigenous kids were taken away from their parents, abused, and punished for speaking their native language or practicing their religion), poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, the wage economy vs living off the land, and so much more. Environmental racism is, at its heart, a systemic attempt to destroy a land-based people and their culture––and it affects every area of life for the Dene.

Given that this is such a complicated story, I’ll admit that I probably wouldn’t have read about this if it was a long magazine piece or a nonfiction book that was text-only. I’m a fairly intelligent person, but I think I would’ve gotten a little lost trying to tie everything together and figure out how all the individual parts work together as a whole. But that’s why I think this book is so brilliant. Joe Sacco is a professional journalist AND comics artist, so he does comic journalism. Covering serious topics with the pictorial aid of comics is the kind of genre-bending, expectation-defying books I crave.

Plus, I really feel like the visual aspects of the book did help aid my understanding. Rather than photojournalism, which is driven by what the journalist actually witnesses and captures on their camera, comics allow the writer/artist to depict whatever they deem necessary for the readers’ understanding, even if they’re not physically there to witness the event in question. For example, drawing comics allowed Joe Sacco to share the flashbacks and long-ago memories of the people he interviewed, which would’ve been difficult if not impossible to do with photos.

I was already a fan of Joe Sacco for his books Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, and once again he blew me away. Five out of five stars; highly recommend.