It’s hard to write a book about the Northwest Territories, especially as a white editorializing tourist, that will be well received by locals (Dave Bidini’s book Midnight Light, released in 2018, produced its fair share of local outrage).
But celebrated “comics journalist” Joe Sacco, from Oregon, braved ice roads and off-grid living to write and draw Paying the Land, a graphic novel about the history of the Dene peoples of the Mackenzie River Valley. Thankfully, he interviewed dozens of chiefs, leaders and activists, quoting them verbatim and allowing them to tell the lion’s share of their own stories. The bookstore in Yellowknife had to restock copies.
Joe Sacco (photo by Michael Tierney)
Paying the Land has a satisfying, textbook-sized heft. With 260 pages of densely woven narratives, reading it might feel, for some, like a difficult but worthy trek. Readers will receive a thorough education about Dene responses to the toxic effects of the mining industry, for example, and the complex nature of land claims.
Visually, the book recreates the immensity of the Northwest Territories in an astounding array of tightly knit crosshatched lines. The territory’s shorelines and mountain ranges are drawn with a beautiful spareness, empty space presiding.
But Sacco’s forte is detail. In one section, the itchy bureaucratic tweed of John A. Macdonald’s jacket sits across the page from a Dene woman’s filmy floral headscarf. He's in a stuffy office deciding what's best for "savage" families. She weeps on a beautiful northern beach, watching a government plane take her children away. The emotional contrast is textural, too.
The book opens with tender portrayals of elder Paul Andrew, a former chief of the Shúhtaot’ine, as a newborn in a moose-skin boat. It finishes with the moving testimony of Eugene Boulanger, a youth learning to hunt caribou in the Mackenzie Mountains. “It was such a feeling of wholeness,” he says. “I never feel as connected to anything as I have being up there.”
From "Paying the Land" by Joe Sacco
Despite Sacco’s careful bracketing, the book’s main emotional thrusts are sad – abuse, alcohol and the arsenic wastes from gold mining. Why, Sacco asks at one point, do the Indigenous people seem adrift, unmoored from the culture that once anchored them?
A graphic novel uses the interplay of text and illustration to tell a story, whether true or not. But in comics journalism, facts are paramount. In this story, the account of student-on-student abuse in residential schools is harrowing. But, while it’s important to discuss the effects of colonization on Indigenous people, the book could have used better counterbalance. The Dene are more than their experiences of trauma. They have so much to offer through the beauty and strength of their cultures.
From "Paying the Land" by Joe Sacco
A remedy, perhaps, is figurative description. Even brief departures from the book’s fact-heavy reportage, or a little more expressivity, may have helped connect readers with Dene culture. Sacco did capture facial contours with amazing accuracy (for locals, a thrill of recognition on every page!). But he didn’t always capture the glow under the skin, the texture and rub of northern lands on the psyche.
From "Paying the Land" by Joe Sacco
More stories like Eugene’s are needed, where shorelines are ancient and elemental, where warm caribou blood steams in the cool air. Drawings may portray moose hides stretched on their frames, but description would help readers appreciate the sounds and smells of tanning (rhythmic scraping, laughter, smoke, spruce and, of course, the reek). In hide-tanning camps, there’s a real sense of joy, muscle, purpose. And in a purported novel, even fabulously drawn graphics need to be literary. ■
Paying the Land by Joe Sacco: Henry Holt & Co., New York City, 2020.
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