Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 71: Paying the Land 鈥� with Joe Sacco
Speakers: Paige Smith, Am Johal, Joe Sacco
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Paige Smith 0:06
Hello listeners. My name is Paige Smith with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is created by 丁香园AV's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. In this episode Am Johal speaks to acclaimed graphic journalist Joe Sacco about his most recent bookPaying The Land, a deep dive into Indigenous sovereignty of the Dene nation in the Northwest Territories, and the long term environmental, social and cultural consequences of a booming resource extraction industry on their lands. I hope you enjoy the episode.
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Am Johal 0:44
Hi, welcome, everyone. Welcome to Below the Radar, really excited to have my friend Joe Sacco with us today Joe has just published an amazing, long forum book that he's worked on for several years on Paying The Land. It's just been out the last couple of months. Previously it was published in France already. But this is a book that Joe's been working on for many, many years for five, six years. I can't remember exactly, but it was a long, a long forum book, a lot of time. And Joe, maybe we could just begin by if you could just introduce yourself a little bit for some of our audience who may not be familiar with your work.
Joe Sacco 1:27
Okay. Well, I mean, I guess what I normally just say is I'm a cartoonist. I study journalism, and it just so happens that I ended up doing journalism in comics, that's kind of what I'm relatively known for and I did books about the Palestinian territories, books about the Bosnian war. Often my books have sort of centered on conflict, in a way. And I think doing the book Paying The Land was my attempt to get away from conflict quite unsuccessfully. But yeah, I'm a cartoonist. I'm a cartoonist, I live in Portland, Oregon.
Am Johal 2:06
Yeah. Joe, in terms of taking on this book and this research project, wondering where did the idea emerge to go up there? Of course, we've been in conflict zones in other parts of the world. But for I think a lot of people this might be, at least outside of the Canadian context, this might be a very obscure, very specific topic, but I'm wondering how it landed in your area that this became a project for you to consider?
Joe Sacco 2:39
Well, I mean, basically, I wanted to do a book that addressed climate change, but not so directly. And always, I've been thinking about Indigenous people and how they are always kind of the first people who are affected by climate change at the point of resource extraction. And I thought of doing sort of a comparative look at peoples on different continents. And I thought, well, maybe Canada would be a good place, because someone had contacted me about Canada, a few years before, Shawna Morgan, who's in the book, who served as my guide, she lives in Yellowknife. And she'd said, you should come up here some time, she'd written me a letter, I didn't know who she was. "Come up and I can show you around a lot of things going on with Indigenous people." And I sort of stored that in the back of my head. And when I finally decided to do a book that had something to do with Indigenous people, I just sort of remembered her, contacted her and thought, oh, Canada will be an easy place to start this comparative project. Because it's Canada. I mean, little knowing that it wasn't going to be that easy, it was way more complex than I thought. But I thought Canada would be sort of a good entree into doing something about Indigenous people. And I contracted with a French publisher, a magazine publisher to do a magazine piece. So basically, I thought of a short piece when I was going up there originally.
Am Johal 4:07
You know, a lot of inside your work, I note this kind of theme of the relationship between tradition and change. There's a lot of links with dispossession. Whether it's internally displaced people, refugees, or in the context of colonialism in Canada as a kind of ongoing project. And I think you deal with that in this book in a very nuanced and interesting, interesting way. And just wondering if you can talk a little bit about your trips up there as well because in the Northwest Territories in Dene territory, it's a complex geography to navigate, as well. And that makes it into the book as well.
Joe Sacco 4:54
Yeah, well, the idea was, and Shawna, the person I mentioned earlier, she sort of developed an itinerary based on the communities she knew through her work, sort of a green centric organization, she spent a lot of time up in different communities up there. So we started in Yellowknife, and basically drove up to Norman wells making stops along the way. And I think the idea of driving was to get a real sense of the immensity of the place and get a sense of the countryside.
Joe Sacco 5:30
So that's, you know, that was the basic idea for the trip. So we visited Talita, which is on the Mackenzie River Valley, up to Norman wells, we visited Trout Lake, and Fort Simpson and Fortly Yard. And I did two trips. That's something that I should mention, because the first trip was for the magazine piece. And I realized there was a lot more going on than I had anticipated. Like you said, this is a book about colonialism. But that's not how I was looking at it at first. But you do realize it is about dispossession. And so it did hit some of those themes that have come up in my other books. And I can think, in particular, the book about the Palestinians, because it's about settler colonialism, ultimately. And in the one case, in the, in the case of the Palestinian territories, you had settlers who came in who wanted physical access to the land, because they wanted to cultivate it originally, and live on it. And in Canada, the situation is more they want to possess, the Canadian government wants to possess the land, not necessarily to, to, you know, farm it, because in the Northwest Territories, farming is not practical, practical in most of it, it's just too cold, but they wanted the natural resources, but ultimately, it's about land. And it's about how do you control land? You control the people on it, you have to sort of break, break their bond to the land, send them off the land, or in some other way, just get, separate them from the land. And so those themes are, I guess, consistent though, like I said, I hadn't really planned to find that. I just, it just became very clear when I was up there, what was going on.
Am Johal 7:23
And it's quite a historical sweep that you take in the book itself in terms of delving into residential schools in terms of the Berger commission, and those types of things. There's certainly textbooks around that history. But how did you find in the research process what parts of the history to kind of elevate into the book? Did it come up through the conversation? You have a very immersive process in terms of being out there. That's certainly part of the research itself. And certainly, it's reflected in your previous books as well.
Joe Sacco 8:00
Well, a lot of the things I was reading were, sort of, about the Berger inquiry, because that was kind of my starting off point. It was about resources, it was about Indigenous people in relationship to those resources, and in telling the stories to this, to this inquiry about what the land meant to them. But what it did give me I mean, it gave me a good sense of what happened in the 70s. And in some ways, in my naive kind of way, I thought I would find a lot of that reflected in what I saw in the trips I took. But of course a lot of time has passed since the 70s. And a lot of things have changed. And you realize that any Indigenous people is not a monolith. So you're going to find many different ways of thinking about resource extraction and land and there are conflicts within those communities. That is something I wasn't really prepared to find because most of the literature you find is sort of activist based in a way and activists are trying to promote or push one part of what's going on, which is Indigenous people having a contentious relationship with resource extraction. It's not always the case. Some of that exists, but you know, not entirely it's very, it's very complicated.
Am Johal 9:28
I also appreciated the humor that you've built into the book and what's obviously a very serious topic whether you're in a safe area garage or other places you do note those pieces that bring the kind of level of levity that holds things together. And I really also appreciated the depictions that you had of the hand games and being at the jamboree so what was like that like for you coming in from like hipster Portland to uh..
[both laugh]
Joe Sacco 10:01
Oh, it was kind of stunning. I mean, I say I was so taken with especially the hand games, just the sheer power of that event, the noise, the energy, the way that people were responding to it, the way they were just really into the game. And initially, when, when I was going, I'd been told by a couple of Indigenous people, you know, this is just another event of ours, another cultural thing we have that is has become monetized on some level, because the hand games are a tournament where money, you know, there's money stakes, and the first prizes for the various teams can be can be quite large. But when I was there, what you realize, you know, whatever, you can think about the prize money and all that, you see the people and you see they are really into the game. And it was, and it's a very collective game. It's um, one of the most interesting things about it is when you look at the game as a Westerner, you sort of think of it as a guessing game, you're guessing what hand a token is in. And you're doing it with a number of people. And you know, you think mathematically, there's only so many ways that can pan out. And it was sort of described to me as more of a psychological game. And I, it's hard to buy if you're a Westerner, but when you're seeing it, you, you're caught up in it, and you see people who are able to somehow or it seems they're able to fake out whoever is trying to choose what hand something's in, and suddenly you just sort of get, you sort of believe it. And I don't know, there's just a great power in that, to see that there's a culture that can take something like that, and, um and sort of demonstrate, I guess, the spiritual aspect of what you think of this as a guessing game.
Am Johal 11:56
Now Joe, in these kinds of long forum immersive research projects, which not only take years of discussion and visiting places, but the actual labor of drawing in the comic book form is such an immersive, time consuming way of working. And I'm wondering how you kind of make that happen? Like, do you think, it's an insurance project, Joe?
Joe Sacco 12:25
Well, it is an endurance project. I mean, you know, you just spend years at the desk. I you know, I study journalism. So I love talking to people, I love going out, the field research is really fun and engaging, you're meeting the most amazing people and having great experiences. And that's, that's a very small part of it. You know, what's underneath the water of that iceberg is the main, the main part of the iceberg is just sitting at your desk drawing day in, day out. And over the years, I've learned ways of structuring my time that are going to make that work, you know, as well as possible. So there's a lot of organization that I've learned to do before I even start a book. I do all my own transcriptions, I transcribe my own recordings, because I need to rehear everyone. It reminds me of what they were saying. And it also gives me, it reminds me of the inflection in people's voices. So I don't farm that off. And it's when I'm listening to all the transcripts, that the ideas really begin to come back to me, especially when you're listening to all of those conversations, but in a period of a few weeks. and I start indexing all my notes, I index all my transcripts, I index all the journal entries I've made, which are, which are pretty extensive, when I'm kind of in the field. And I indexed by subject. So if there's a character who appears in various parts of my journals, or my interviews, I will know exactly where he appears. And I'll have sort of a brief synopsis of what he says in each place. So that it's all at my fingertips. I'm not like searching through my journal saying, "oh, didn't someone say something about such and such" . I go through and index everything, and that'll take weeks. So the preparation work can be a couple of months before I even start writing, then I start writing. And writing is a process that I never know how long it's going to take. It could be because you're trying to get you're trying to use words and you try to get the words right. And what can sometimes take two minutes can take, you know, two hours to get a phrase right. So I never really know how long that's gonna take but then the drawing when I'm finally ready to draw, um, I kind of know I sort of know how much I can get done every day. Because then it's like, I mean, forgive this analogy, but it's like digging a ditch. I enjoy the drawing, but I know how much I can get done every day. But what I don't do is plan my drawings beforehand, I don't storyboard. Because I need something spontaneous. If my script is basically set, I need something spontaneous, something creative to do that day. So generally speaking, coming up with the drawings is a spontaneous day to day kind of thing. So, you know, you're sort of mixing, long term planning, with some creativity at that moment. At that very second, when your pencil is on the page.
Am Johal 15:35
Now, Joe, you've been doing this for a long time now, 25-30 years, something, something in that zone, you're like the heavyweight champion of comic book journalism, you kind of invented a form. There's others doing it now as well. But the time that you were doing, it was very new and novel, and I think many people were trying to understand how to register it as how to how to place it and those types of things and visiting so many places of conflict and serious subject matter and doing work in the field that certainly carries out a kind of vicarious trauma to you as a person that that lives through it and is, is hearing these stories. I'm wondering how you've kind of pulled together that part of the work like the intensity of being in these places with people, and then spending large amounts of time alone, literally drawing?
Joe Sacco 16:35
Well, it's funny, I mean, one of the ways I was trying to step away from the violence was to do something about Indigenous people in Canada. And of course, when I was there, kind of the elephant in the room was the residential schools. I hadn't come up to Canada to do a book about residential schools, but it always was sort of floating around the conversations. So I had to address it. And I realized that residential schools were a part of this process of dispossessing people. I mean, that's clear. And what I realized too, is you can't get away from violence, because this was a form of violence. It was basically a war on people's culture, trying to break people from the land. So unfortunately, I always back in that realm of drawing violence and dealing with that again, but it's just something you have to just respect the material and what it needs. And you have to address that sort of thing. And not just the violence of the residential schools, because that the residential schools helps to, helps you place the domestic violence, the alcoholism, and all those other things that Indigenous communities are suffering, you have to tie the two things together, and then tie all that with colonialism and with land dispossession.
Joe Sacco 18:00
The way I personally deal with it is I'm working on, you know, I've told you about this in other, you know, just in our personal conversations, I'm working on the stones book. And the more I work on that, the more I realize I'm trying to work out with humor, some of all the compounded violence that's sort of in my head, that I've been, you know, seeing and talking about and drawing, I realized that's what that book is about is trying to sort of come to terms with that trauma once removed, you could say. So you deal with it in different ways. You know, you have a martini after you've done some drawing,
[laughs]
Joe Sacco 18:44
the same ways people deal with鈥�
Am Johal 18:46
With salt and pepper chips...
[both laugh]
Joe Sacco 18:48
With salt and pepper potato chips, exactly and you know, you have your friends and you have your relationship and you you know, all those things sort of leaven the work you're doing with things, the joyous things in life, let's say that, and also even doing the book on what was going on with Indigenous people, you, you drawing the hand games, drawing people on the land, drawing people describing life in the bush, when they were growing up, all those things really help. I mean, it was actually a real pleasure to draw the bush stories I drew. That contrasted with drawing the residential stuff. So it was a pleasure to draw something that was, you know, organic: people on the land, the animals, what they were wearing the tents, drawing them drying fish. All that stuff was kind of joyful. For me. It literally was joyful for me when I was drawing it.
Am Johal 19:56
Now, Joe, you're based in Portland right now in a super intense political time, both in the city and the state and the American election and in the atmosphere, what's your read on what's going on in your own city?
Joe Sacco 20:15
Well, I mean, Oregon is a is a state that had a KKK Foundation, and a lot of redlining, keeping black people out of neighborhoods, dispossessing black people here, workers who came up, especially during the war, to work on liberty ships, dispossessing them, gentrification, putting in hospitals where they used to live, putting in a freeway where they used to live, you know, a convention center, all this sort of stuff. So this has been going on in Portland for a long time, problems, racial problems here, and especially with the police department, the police department here has a lot of a history of, let's say, racial abuse, that sort of thing that you see in other police departments in the United States. So initially, when people in America had been protesting police brutality, there was a history of it here that was being directly addressed, being protesters trying to address it. Now, of course, that intensified with the feds coming in.
Joe Sacco 21:26
But I mean, we have outstanding issues here. outstanding issues in the United States, issues with so many things. I mean, at least in Canada, despite your problems with Indigenous people, and you have many, you have still tried to make some effort to have an addressing of what happened historically, it doesn't necessarily tie up the bow and what the effects of colonialism because that sort of thing is ongoing, whether you have a commission or not. But in the United States, we haven't done any of this work. We haven't done that work with the African American community, obviously. We haven't done it with the Indigenous communities. So there are a lot of issues going on. Plus, of course, you have the economic issues, which are front and center with COVID, as they are around the world. So there's a lot of tension here. There's a lot of tension in the United States.
Am Johal 22:23
Yeah, Joe, besides the stones book that you're working on, do you have other projects on the go? Or you're dreaming up?
Joe Sacco 22:31
Well, I have another project, it's about India. And it's about it...
Am Johal 22:37
It is! I was emailing you just like, "oh, you need to do something light like I don't know, India, Pakistan partition, Joe and its effects on contemporary Kashmir." And what's your project?
Joe Sacco 22:51
Oh, well, it's about and I've done the research already. Um, it's sort of interesting. It's a book about a ride that took place in Muzaffarnagar, which is a district of Uttar Pradesh. And I've already done the research, violence between Hindus and Muslims, and what happened there. And it's really about what people tell themselves about a riot a year afterwards, because people sort of begin to invent stories and create narratives for themselves. But also, more broadly, how does violence work in democracy?
Joe Sacco 23:30
And that's something that isn't an issue just for India. It's an issue for North America, in particular the United States. So I've had this project. And the truth is, I was going to start and I did start that project before I did Paying The Land (the book about Canada). And in some ways, I sort of drifted towards Paying The Land because I thought that would be a lighter book, somehow. It didn't turn out to be. And partly, I'm doing the stones book to sort of keep from doing the book about India. I mean, I need to do that book and I should do that book. It's an important book to do. But for my own mental health, I need a little break. If you know what I mean.
Am Johal 24:13
That's totally fair enough. Thank you so much for joining us, Joe. And once again, the book everyone is Paying The Land by Joe Sacco. Don't just get this one. There's many, many other great Sacco books. And thanks so much for joining us from Portland Joe.
Joe Sacco 24:31
A pleasure to talk to you Am, really a pleasure.
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Paige Smith 24:36
Thank you for joining us to hear from our guest Joe Sacco. Stay in the loop of Below the Radar by following us on Facebook at Below the Radar pod and on Twitter at BTR underscore pod. And be sure to subscribe wherever you find your podcasts. Thanks again for listening. Have a great day.
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