Paying the Land
By Joe Sacco. Metropolitan Books, 2020. 272 p. Ill. ISBN 978-1910702581 (hardcover), $29.99.
Katrina Spencer, Librarian for African American & African Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Reviewed June 15, 2021
Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land is a work of both graphic and literary journalism that documents the difficult entanglements surrounding Indigenous rights and land use within northwestern Canada. When Sacco decides to visit the land that the Dene and other First Nations peoples have long inhabited, he is underprepared for the challenges both the climate and terrain pose. With the help of his trusty aide, Shauna Morgan, the two navigate unforgiving, wintry roads. Once arriving, Sacco sketches the histories of Indigenous peoples whose cultures prized self-reliance, community, intergenerational education, and harmony with nature. In Sacco’s busy, monochrome, and meticulously shaded pages, the vibrant lives of people who moved about seasonally, trapped beaver, hunted caribou, fished trout, built boats, and feted with traditional games is revealed. However, the legacies of exploitative Canadian treaties, the imposition of obligatory residential schools, and endemic substance abuse wreak havoc on a way of life the people of the land fight to preserve. While the rich resources within the land attract developers anxious to extract all the region has to offer, it is at the expense of cultures that have long found ways to live sustainably.
Sacco’s work is ambitious, covering hundreds of years of history and highlighting the ways in which contact with people of European descent has led to cultural genocide for countless Indigenous groups. Sacco makes it clear that he is a master of his visual craft with his painstaking lines of unsparing detail evident in every panel. One imbalance, however, is the font size of the text juxtaposed with the rich imagery. A reader must zoom in to read the dialogue and narration and zoom out to take in the art. Overall, Paying the Land is another laudable work of broad appeal appropriate for secondary school, public, academic, art, and special libraries.