Joe Sacco, Paying the Land

I'm a fan of journalist/cartoonist Joe Sacco, both his solo work in something like Journalism as well as his collaborations in work like Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale (with Matt Hern and Am Johal). As well, I've got family in Canada's northern regions: my sister-in-law has lived in the NWT since the late 70s, first in Inuvik (where she married an Inuit man and had two daughters, my nieces) then in Yellowknife. As a result, I'm the right reader for Sacco's Paying the Land, because it's about the relationship between the people and the land in the northern regions of what's currently called Canada.

Nancy Payne wrote a thoughtful review for Canada's History, so you should visit that if you want a traditional review (with lots of details about where the book goes). Basically, though, Sacco travels through the north with a range of locals, most of them Dene from different communities, learning about the last few centuries of change, with an emphasis on the last few decades: environmental, social, and political. Sacco has always had a keen eye for injustice and complexity, so the north gives him an awful lot to think about.

The question, really, is one of possibility. The Dene and other northern peoples have always had to live out the idea of persistence, surviving innumerable trials and privations while also seeking and finding joy. (They're not serving a sentence, but living their lives; one isn't defined only by the challenges one faces.) Sacco does well to provide deep context for what persistence means now, and what it may mean in a climate-change future whose politics are fraught, unclear, and evolving. 

Many of his chapters are spent with elders, but he's careful as well to include perspectives from all generations, and his informants/characters vary between urban folks, those who've moved from bush to town and back, and those who've always lived in the bush. He's good on various political moments and movements over the last several decades, too. Sacco's depiction of these small communities, and the people who live there, for me is as clear as anything I've read since Hugh Brody's long-ago Maps and Dreams, which I mean as high praise even if (a) you may not agree and (b) you've read things I haven't.

As he so often does, Sacco ends up documenting how we got here, and setting up some ways to imagine what'll come next. To his credit (and as he tends to do in other work, too), he leaves the work of imagining up to the younger people he encounters and whose voices he documents. I come away from it hopeful, cautiously, but then again that's already how my nieces make me feel. More than usual, I'm not sure that my own reading experience would mirror that of a reader whose experiences are different from my own.

But I really, really enjoyed it, and I'm already passing around my copy of Paying the Land!