When he first traveled to the Canadian Northwest Territories, Joe Sacco wasn’t looking to book length comic about the Dene people. But to hear him describe it, the cartoonist’s books more often than not have a tendency to take on a life of their own. Sacco is almost certainly best known for pioneering comics journalism that has often taken him to heavily conflicted corners of the globe. It’s a sentiment that was probably best expressed in the title of his 1997 collection, War Junkie. Paying the Land is a quieter book in a number of respects — but the story it tells is every bit as important. Sacco seeks to document the story of an indigenous culture ravaged in the name of “progress.”

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