This week, as one Canadian doctor testified before a House of Commons committee regarding his right and moral obligation to relay what he witnessed as a health-care professional in Gaza, Suzanne Shoush, Indigenous Health Faculty lead for the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto relays a story about another physician who faced professional setbacks for speaking out against atrocities. Despite facing ostracism in 1922, Dr. Peter Bryce exposed the horrifying mortality rates and abuses of Indigenous children within the residential school system. His account remains a crucial document, over 100 years later.

“The plight in Gaza resonates with the historical experiences of the Indigenous Peoples” in Canada, particularly of the residential school system, writes Shoush in The Conversation Canada. In Gaza, health-care workers are facing a horrific reality, in what the United Nations has called “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.” They are witnessing the deaths and injuries of thousands of children, trying to provide care amid a collapsing health-care system, exacerbated by attacks on hospitals and restrictions on medical supplies.

By nature of their training, health-care workers are meticulous observers, Shoush says. Since they are also frequently on the front lines of humanitarian crises, their accounts offer a vital window into the human cost of conflict. Bryce’s outspokenness shows that “the voices of health-care workers are vital.”

This week, another story from The Conversation also highlights the connections between Canada and Gaza. Charles Levkoe, Canada Research Chair in Equitable and Sustainable Food Systems at Lakehead University and his co-writers outline how the destruction of food systems in Gaza and Canada is part of a larger effort of land dispossession and capitalist accumulation. They write: “a core element of genocide includes food militarization and weaponization,” a tactic that has been used by colonial powers in Canada in an attempt to exterminate, dispossess and control Indigenous populations.

You may also want to revisit Don’t Call Me Resilient’s two-part podcast on starvation as a weapon of control which also looks at parallels of how food systems have been controlled in different colonial situations.

Speaking of the politics of food, if you are in Toronto, please join us for an in-person event with the Don’t Call Me Resilient podcast on Nov. 14. I will be speaking with scholar Andrea Freeman for the Canadian launch of her book, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch. We’ll get into ideas about fry bread, Aunt Jemima and how milk became a symbol of white supremacy.

Also today:

• Seen a jellyfish off the dock? You’re not imagining things — they’re increasingly in our lakes
• Decoding the body language of politicians: Beware of misleading analyses
• Did a Canadian developer really invent bitcoin? A new HBO show explores an intriguing theory

All the best.