Paying the Land

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE GUARDIAN, THE BROOKLYN RAIL, THE GLOBE AND MAIL, POP MATTERS, COMICS BEAT, & PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

The Dene have lived in the vast Mackenzie River Valley since time immemorial, by their account. To the Dene, the land owns them, not the other way around, & it is central to their livelihood & very way of being. But the subarctic Canadian Northwest Territories are home to valuable resources, including oil, gas, & diamonds. With mining came jobs & investment, but also road-building, pipelines, & toxic waste, which scarred the landscape, & alcohol, drugs, & 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 & benefits of development. The mining boom is only the latest assault on indigenous culture: 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 & turned them into wage laborers; the government land claims stacked against the Dene Nation; & their uphill efforts to revive a wounded culture.

Against a vast & gorgeous landscape that dwarfs all human scale, Paying the Land lends an ear to trappers & chiefs, activists & priests, to tell a sweeping story about money, dependency, loss, & culture―recounted in stunning visual detail by one of the greatest cartoonists alive.

From the “heir to R. Crumb & Art Spiegelman” (Economist), a masterful work of comics journalism about indigenous North America, resource extraction, & our debt to the natural world

[tags: Comics & Graphic Novels, Ethnic Studies, General, Native American Studies, Natural Resources, Nature, Nonfiction, Social Science]