Joe Sacco: Paying the Land

The Northwest Territories are home to valuable resources, including oil, gas, and diamonds. With mining came jobs and investment, but also road-building, pipelines, and toxic waste, which scarred the landscape and deformed the ways of life for Dene communities.

Cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco explores these issues through his book Paying the Land. In this thoughtful dicussion, Sacco was joined in conversation with Dene scholar Glen Coulthard as they spoke of Sacco’s inspiration to write Paying the Land, what he learned as was surprised by as he spoke to Dene community members, and the way violence arose as a resounding theme within the book – and wove its way through sweeping stories of loss, resistance, and culture. This conversation later opened to the audience, who asked questions inquiring about Sacco’s drawing process, the meaning behind his particular ways of illustrating, and his approach to documenting stories in unfamiliar places. 

About the Speakers

Joe Sacco is a Maltese-American cartoonist renowned for his long-form graphic journalism and fieldwork in conflict zones and places where people are facing displacement and dispossession. He is the author of numerous books, including Footnotes in Gaza, for which he received an Eisner Award and the Ridenhour Book Prize, as well as Palestine, Journalism, Safe Area Goražde (also an Eisner winner). His works have been translated into fourteen languages and his comics reporting has appeared in Details, The New York Times Magazine, Time, and Harpers. 

Glen Coulthard is Yellowknives Dene and an associate professor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and the Departments of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book, the Canadian Political Science Association’s CB Macpherson Award for Best Book in Political Theory, published in English or French, in 2014/2015, and the Rik Davidson Studies in Political Economy Award for Best Book in 2016. He is also a co-founder of Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, a decolonial, Indigenous land-based post-secondary program operating on his traditional territories in Denendeh(Northwest Territories).

About the Book

In Paying the Land, Joe Sacco travels to the North to reveal a people in conflict over the costs and 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 into wage labourer; the government land claims stacked against the Dene Nation; and their uphill efforts to revive a wounded culture.

Paying the Land has been named a Best Book Of 2020 by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Brooklyn Rail, The Globe And Mail, Pop Matters, Comics Beat, and Publishers Weekly.