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speculativebecky 's review for:
Paying the Land
by Joe Sacco
Thank you to Henry Holt Books for reaching out and sending me a free copy of Paying the Land by Joe Sacco.
Paying the Land is a nonfiction comic about the Dene, a broad term for a vast group of Indigenous people who’ve lived in what’s now Canada’s Northwest Territories since time immemorial. The book discusses the effects of colonization, their changing way of life, a history of fraught struggles with the Canadian government over land, resources, and fracking, and the intergenerational trauma of residential schools.
Joe Sacco is a Maltese American cartoonist and journalist, best known for works of comics journalism such as Footnotes in Gaza. (I was not familiar with him before being approached with this title, but nonfiction comics are very much in my wheelhouse.) I will always support #OwnVoices works over ones, such as this one, which are not written by authors from the community they are describing. For that reason, I read and highlighted This Place: 150 Years Retold, a collection of Indigenous-created comics about their history, before this. Please also check out that excellent book; if you only read one of these titles, I recommend it be This Place.
Paying the Land differentiates itself by being a more singular dive into only the Dene. I am not Dene (or Indigenous) so I may have significant gaps in my reaction to this book, and I don’t purport to speak to how well it represents the Dene. In creating this book Sacco clearly began from a foundation of significant research and interviews of Dene from multiple communities. Although Sacco is present at times as a character in the story (he frequently depicts himself in the interviewing process and his travels), the bulk of the narration is composed of quotes from those he’s speaking to. He includes differing perspectives and opinions on many topics, so the overall impression from this book is not a single story, a fact which I deeply appreciated. However sometimes it could be difficult to ascertain what the more popularly held belief might be, since there would usually be a handful of interviewees for a topic, sometimes with just one person for each side of a debate.
This book is a quick read for one so densely packed with information and heavy topics. Sacco is skilled with the comic medium, and ultimately I’m quite glad I read it.
Paying the Land is a nonfiction comic about the Dene, a broad term for a vast group of Indigenous people who’ve lived in what’s now Canada’s Northwest Territories since time immemorial. The book discusses the effects of colonization, their changing way of life, a history of fraught struggles with the Canadian government over land, resources, and fracking, and the intergenerational trauma of residential schools.
Joe Sacco is a Maltese American cartoonist and journalist, best known for works of comics journalism such as Footnotes in Gaza. (I was not familiar with him before being approached with this title, but nonfiction comics are very much in my wheelhouse.) I will always support #OwnVoices works over ones, such as this one, which are not written by authors from the community they are describing. For that reason, I read and highlighted This Place: 150 Years Retold, a collection of Indigenous-created comics about their history, before this. Please also check out that excellent book; if you only read one of these titles, I recommend it be This Place.
Paying the Land differentiates itself by being a more singular dive into only the Dene. I am not Dene (or Indigenous) so I may have significant gaps in my reaction to this book, and I don’t purport to speak to how well it represents the Dene. In creating this book Sacco clearly began from a foundation of significant research and interviews of Dene from multiple communities. Although Sacco is present at times as a character in the story (he frequently depicts himself in the interviewing process and his travels), the bulk of the narration is composed of quotes from those he’s speaking to. He includes differing perspectives and opinions on many topics, so the overall impression from this book is not a single story, a fact which I deeply appreciated. However sometimes it could be difficult to ascertain what the more popularly held belief might be, since there would usually be a handful of interviewees for a topic, sometimes with just one person for each side of a debate.
This book is a quick read for one so densely packed with information and heavy topics. Sacco is skilled with the comic medium, and ultimately I’m quite glad I read it.