One of the first words I learned when I moved to Mexico was gente. The English translation is “people,” and you often hear Mexicans talking about mi gente. For those who don’t speak Spanish, it’s pronounced “me hen-tay” and it means “my people.” I usually heard it as a fond word, an embrace, although it could sometimes be used in exasperation. 

The word was originally brought to Spain (and Portugal, and France) by the ancient Romans, who used gens and its plural gente to mean a family, a clan, or a group of villagers. Its root was the Greek γένος, or genos, which had the same meaning. In all cases, it was exclusionary, as it still is today. I was never anyone’s gente, although I could be insulted by someone calling me one of “those people,” meaning a damn foreigner.

The word genocide has the same root. In the early 1940s, the Polish-Jewish lawyer Rafael Lemkin combined the Greek word genos with the Latin suffix -caedo, which means killing, and coined the term genocide to refer to the destruction of a nation or ethnic group. Many people don’t seem to realize it’s such a modern word. Maybe this represents progress: that we’ve finally begun to realize that killing groups of people is wrong and not just, you know, war.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped it. 

I’ve spent the past weeks reading about the historic genocide of Indigenous people in Canada, the current genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and the fallout from the genocidal Holocaust of Jews during the Second World War, which made Lemkin coin the term in the first place. 

As I read, I kept hearing mi gente, mi gente, mi gente—my people—howls of outrage and horror and mourning from authors focused on the loss of people they consider their own. A couple are writing largely about their families and friends, another about people living in the same part of the world where he was born, so of course it hits them all hard and personally. There’s also the technical fact that a piece of writing needs to be focused, and loses power by wandering too far from its core subject. 

Yet I noticed one thing. Omar El Akkad has written a book about the killings in Gaza with the perfect title, One Day, Everyone Will have Always Been Against This—a title that could in fact be applied to genocides throughout history. He focuses tightly on the reprehensible campaign of bombing and starvation against the Palestinian people in Gaza by the Israeli army, the IDF, under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Meanwhile, El Akkad gives little more than a paragraph to the immediate trigger for the war. 

“On October 7, 2023, armed groups led by Hamas’s military wing launched a coordinated attack on multiple cities near the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Fighters killed 1,195 people, of which 815 were civilians, according to an analysis by Agence France Presse, including at least 282 women and 36 children. They abducted more than 250 people. It was a bloodbath, orchestrated by exactly the kind of entity that thrives in the absence of anything resembling a future.”

And that’s pretty much it.

As I was reading El Akkad’s book, I also picked up the Sunday New York Times magazine to read a story by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Like El Akkad, she’s a writer I admire, and in this case she writes about the Holocaust. Or rather, about her long refusal to pay attention to the Holocaust, despite pressure from her Jewish family and friends, which ends when she reconsiders and interviews a Holocaust survivor, whose story she details. 

Brodesser-Akner is writing an article, not a book, and one that focuses primarily on the past. Yet she also reports on the recent rise in antisemitism in New York, including the appalling treatment of her two sons, which made her finally decide to engage with stories of the Holocaust. 

In the course of this, she mentions Gaza only once. Partway through her heartfelt story she notes not only the throngs of the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors protesting “what they see as the weaponization of the Holocaust to justify the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza, but also the thousands of (grandchildren) who have moved newly toward a Zionism that they didn’t identify with before Oct. 7, 2023.” 

Once again, that’s it.

I will put it out there that killing civilians is wrong, whether we’re talking about 851 Israeli civilians killed by Hamas or somewhere north of 50,000 Palestinian civilians killed by the IDF, many of them women and children. Yes, it’s radically disproportionate, but I think that every single killing is wrong. Writing this will no doubt bring trolls down on me. Mi gente, mi gente, they will cry. My people. Yet aren’t we all people? 

A thought I will leave hanging while I turn to Tanya Talaga’s latest book, The Knowing. 

The Knowing is a 434-page history of the residential school system in Canada, through which the government and several religious orders set out to assimilate generations of Indigenous children—unasked—into white society. Talaga is a member of Fort William First Nation in Ontario, and she defines the overall treatment of Indigenous people by settler society over the centuries as genocidal, back to the early days of indiscriminate murder. Starting in the late 19^th century, when children were first sent to residential schools, thousands more began to die there, many thousands were abused and uncounted others have been traumatized. Overall, the schools created damage that echoes down through the generations.

I’ll come back to both El Akkad and Brodesser-Akner later. But Talaga’s book is far longer and more detailed, and I want to start with a look at what she has to say about the death of so many Indigenous children and the historic forces behind this. She takes the space to create context while also highlighting individual stories, and that’s a powerful approach. 

It was a relief at first to read The Knowing. I’d tossed aside a couple of other books beforehand because they were badly written, and life is too short. But Talaga spent more than twenty years as a reporter for the Toronto Star, and in 2017 she wrote Seven Fallen Feathers, the multi-award-winning investigation into the suspicious deaths of seven Indigenous high school students in Thunder Bay. Her prose is clean, intelligent and observant, and she knows how much detail to include without losing the reader in a labyrinth of facts. 

Then we get to the content.

Reading her book, I had the same reaction as Talaga did when reading the 2014 Nunavut Court of Justice judgment against a Catholic priest named Eric Dejaegar, who had taught in a school on Chesterfield Inlet on the western shore of Hudson’s Bay. 

Dejaegar was convicted of committing 80 sex-related offenses between 1976 and 1982 against Inuit students at the school, young people aged from four to 20 years old. These included rape, indecent assault, unlawful confinement, acts of gross indecency, threatening and buggery, all of which are precisely and horribly described in the judgment. (He was also charged with three acts of bestiality with a dog.) In 2014, he was finally sentenced to 19 years in prison.

“Many times I had to put the judgment down,” Talaga writes, “get up from my desk and walk around.”

I felt the same way as I read the The Knowing, which is not a criticism. The repeated stories of cruelty and abuse Talaga tells are deeply painful, and it’s hard to read much at once. Overall they tell a quest story, a version of the descent of Odysseus into the Underworld as he searches for his stolen wife, Eurydice. Talaga is Polish-Canadian on her father’s side and mainly Ininiw (or Cree) on her mother’s, and the book represents her long search for members of her Indigenous family lost in northern Ontario, children who were snatched into residential schools, starting with her great-grandmother, Annie Carpenter. 

Talaga looks for her family in archives and historical photographs, often working with Indigenous researchers she meets on the Facebook groups she says are huge in First Nations communities. She’s soon stunned to find that her great-grandmother, Annie, had three children during a first marriage in the 1880s whom no one in the family had ever heard of. Annie’s son George is recorded as dying of whooping cough in 1895 at the age of seven. The baptisms of Sarah and James are written down in church records, but then the children disappear. 

“Were they sent away to school,” Talaga asks, “never to return?” A fair question, when she finds that Annie’s younger children were later sent to residential schools, including her grandmother Liz, and especially as she wrrites about the many children who are recorded as never making it home.

Liz was Annie’s daughter from her second marriage, and although she refused to speak about her childhood, it was known in the family that Liz was sent to a residential school, probably a Catholic one. Attempts to assimilate her into white society worked, at least in part. “She loved Jesus Christ and insisted on eating fish on Fridays,” Talaga writes. “She believed everything Indian was dirty, and she loved the royal family. Her pride and joy was a silver tea set, her ownership of which was a longstanding mystery: no one knew how she’d gotten the money to pay for it.”

She was also a midwife who could slingshot a partridge, take out a moose and skin a beaver, and she used plants known to Indigenous medicine to cure her children’s ailments. Are people ever simple? Polemicists and racists try to make people seem one-dimensional, but they—we—never are.

The book is replete with the stories of complex people like Liz and Annie, along with reports of Talaga’s journalistic trips to residential school sites throughout Canada, her coverage of politicians apologizing to Indigenous people, even a visit to the Vatican with First Nations leaders to meet then-Pope Francis who, in a gesture intended to be kind, allowed them to view sacred Indigenous goods taken to Rome over the centuries, then refused to give them back. (Recognized as a reporter, Talaga was kicked out of the Vatican museum.) 

Yet there’s another level to the book, one I sat thinking about while taking my reading breaks. As the Talking Heads ask, How did we get here? The fact is, so much human misery starts with the hunger for land, and Talaga interlaces her family’s stories with a historical overview of Indigenous-settler relations. She writes her way back to the arrival of the first Europeans in North America, people who wanted to settle the territory where Indigenous nations had lived for at least 10,000 years. She doesn’t quite mention what other historians do, that the First Nations didn’t always live in harmony. They fought over territory as well, often brutally. People were killed, hostages taken. Some were enslaved.

But the arrival of the Europeans in North America with their guns and infectious diseases made everything exponentially worse, and millions of Indigenous people died. As they did, the European settlements spread westward. This was further encouraged in the late 19^th century Canada as Prime Minister John A. Macdonald built his celebrated national railroad, planning to unite the country—and in the process working to evict Indigenous people from their remaining land. 

By 1870, numerous land treaties had been signed with Indigenous people, and Macdonald wanted to get rid of them. “Sir,” he wrote one correspondent, “We are looking anxiously for your report as to Indian titles both within Manitoba and without; as to the best means of extinguishing [terminating] the Indian titles in the valley of the Saskatchewan… and [to] open it for settlement.”

The phrase “land hunger” sounds antique, at least until you turn on the news and watch the latest drone attacks launched by Russia in Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine: a land that was once part of the Soviet empire, and that he wants back. Or watch the latest reports about M23 rebels fighting their way through Africa: a guerrilla army backed by tiny Rwanda that’s jockeying for control of neighbouring land in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Then there’s Gaza. Israel’s attack immediately after October 7 was an attempt to free the 250 hostages (and, as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted at the time, a move by Benjamin Netanyahu to keep his job, since he’ll face corruption charges the moment he’s out of office). 

But it’s been clear for a while that freeing the hostages is no longer the main motive behind the siege of Gaza. In January of this year, newly-inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump bluntly proposed it be “cleaned out” of Palestinians. His suggestion that it be turned into a high-end resort while Palestinians are resettled elsewhere (not in the U.S.) has received enthusiastic support from far-right Israeli cabinet ministers. 

And at the end of last month, as Israel celebrated Jerusalem Day, Agence France Presse reports that some Israeli youths chanted “death to Arabs,” “may your village burn,” and “Gaza belongs to us” during a march through Jerusalem. Afterward, Netanyahu revealed his intention to annex at least part of Gaza. Later, ministers in his cabinet announced that 22 new Jewish settlements have been approved in the occupied West Bank, which will be the largest expansion in decades. 

Adolf Hitler spoke of lebensraum, the need for German “living space,” which he used to justify the violent push of his Nazi regime into eastern Europe during World War II. Yet it’s important to make a distinction. In launching his genocide against Jews, Hitler wasn’t after Jewish land, since centuries of antisemitic laws throughout Europe had ensured that most Jews didn’t own any. (Not that Hitler was averse to ethnic Germans taking over Jewish businesses, or seizing Jewish art collections.) 

That means there’s a difference between the Nazis’ expansionist policies and the genocidal Holocaust that Hitler ordered, which was rooted in an atavistic hatred of the Other so intense it resulted in the systematic murder of six million Jews. I realize that this is why some of my Jewish friends refuse to accept that the word “genocide” can refer to other groups of people. Maybe the one million Tutsis killed by Hutu militias in Rwanda in 1994. But definitely not the Palestinians killed in Gaza, since many equate Palestinian civilians with militants from the terrorist group Hamas, which kidnapped and killed their gente on October 7. 

Yet the most common way to try to justify taking peoples’ land is to demonize them, make them Other, a separate and threatening group. Once that’s done, the aggressors start the killing. Vladimir Putin called Ukrainian leaders “fascists,” which they are not, and launched his invasion. As Hitler’s Luftwaffe prepared to rain bombs on England during the Battle of Britain, he referred to the English as “the Jew among the Aryan people.” For centuries, Indigenous people were called “savages” by European settlers picking up their guns.

Fortunately for humanity, there’s also pushback. I wrote recently about growing up in a Vancouver suburb near the Capilano reserve of the Squamish people, where the racist attitude toward Indigenous people had grown so ingrained that many of our white neighbours seemed unable to say the word “Indian” without attaching a pejorative. But I also wrote about my difficult, damaged and admirable father’s response when a neighbour passed a comment about “drunken Indians.” 

“Well, Jeff,” he said. “I know a hell of a lot of Indians who aren’t drunks, and a hell of a lot of drunks who aren’t Indians.” 

Because there’s this, too. Many folks understand that people are people, and are able to find it in themselves to say so, despite the opprobrium they often face. Life is subtle and surprising and multifarious. And I would put it out there that we all have a lot in common, not least because those in power are unimaginative and repetitive as they seek to exercise control. 

There’s a remarkable section near the end of Talaga’s book when she films her friend Sol Mamakwa as he returns to the Mennonite residential school where he spent two miserable years during the 1980s. Disturbingly, he can only remember the first, even when shown the yearbook from his second year, where he’s pictured as a member of the student council. The second year is a complete blank.

Mamakwa is a member of the Kingfisher Lake First Nation and an Ontario politician, MPP for the Kiiwetinoong riding and deputy leader of the provincial NDP. At the remote Stirland Lake Indian Residential School, which operated from 1971 to 1986, he shared a tiny basement room with three other teens, one with a linoleum floor and fake wood panelling. Each young man was given a single drawer in the room’s only dresser to hold his belongings. 

Beatings were common, the boys strapped so hard they couldn’t sit down. Their letters home were censored, so their parents didn’t know how badly they were treated, and how desperately they wanted to leave. Chillingly, the yearbook also contains a picture of the so-called flying priest, an Anglican named Ralph Rowe, a convicted multiple sexual predator of teenage boys who visited the school, although there is no record of him committing offences at Stirland Lake. 

It’s also true that during their visit, Mamakwa and Talaga were escorted around the school by a former gym teacher, Dwayne, who tells them he knew nothing of the abuse at the time, while agreeing it was wrong. Guileless and friendly, Dwayne says that he loved his students, stunning Talaga, although it’s clear he means it.

Reading the precise, concrete details of life in a residential school, my mind flew to Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre, in which Jane spends her childhood in an equally abusive religious school. It’s based on Brontë’s time at the Clergy Daughters’ School, a boarding school in Lancashire where the daughters of “middling” clergymen were educated to be upper servants: sometimes teachers, but more often governesses or paid companions to wealthy women. 

The parallels to residential schools are uncanny. Here’s one: In helping to formulate Canada’s residential system, educator Egerton Ryerson proposed that Indigenous students be taught to be servants, like the British children: the girls to be domestics, the boys to be farm laborers. 

In the school Brontë describes, physical abuse was common, conditions dire. The girls slept in unheated dormitories in winter, and in the morning they had to break the ice on the basins of water they used to wash their faces. The floors were bare boards. The breakfast porridge was often burned and usually inedible. There’s also the fact that tuberculosis was endemic, as it would be in residential schools. Two of Brontë’s sisters who attended the school died young of TB, and she always blamed the dreadful conditions for her own stunted growth. (Charlotte Brontë stood less than five feet tall.) She even created a teacher named Miss Temple who was kind to the children, but who could change nothing. 

As I read The Knowing, I wished Talaga would make more connections. The girls Brontë writes about were all white, but they were of a lower social class than the founders of the school, and class is important. I also wondered how the treatment of Indigenous students compares to the treatment of Black students in some public schools today, where they report being directed by (kind, concerned) teachers toward non-academic programs. 

No blame. I have an idea that as Talaga wrote her 434-page book, it grew in directions she hadn’t anticipated, leaving little room for other people and connections. As a writer myself, I can’t help wondering if she set out to write a more focused story about her great-grandmother, Annie Carpenter, and planned to extrapolate from Annie’s experiences into a history of residential schools. But she kept encountering more of her missing gente; kept getting more invitations to visit the sites of former schools, to hear more scripted apologies, to go to Rome. (I hope the new Pope Leo XIV, given his years among Indigenous peoples in Peru, will promptly return the First Nations’ property.) 

Usually I was glad to read someone else’s story, a human face surfacing as Talaga took me in and out of the dry historical record. Sometimes I thought, Editor? 

Overall, The Knowing is an immensely valuable and deeply affecting book. People need to read it—by which I don’t just mean Talaga’s people, su gente, but all of us. 

I lived in Mexico for three years, then moved to Brazil for three more. There, the word gente can also mean “we.” A sentence might literally translate as, “People went to the school in Rio.” But it would really mean, “We went to school in Rio.” I think the word gives a warmer hug in Portuguese than it does in Spanish, and feels a bit more inclusive. So many dreadful things are going on in our poor old world that we need more hugs, more connections, more inclusivity.

Although fixing things would be better. 

That was longer than I planned to write, too. Next time I’ll dive into what Omar El Akkad and Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote, instead of what they didn’t. 

I promise it will be shorter.