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Tragic Discoveries from the Canadian Indigenous Schools and other Events

Khalid Elhassan July 27, 2021 37 min

Painting by Kent Monkman of the tragic seizure of Indigenous children by the RCMP to place in mandatory boarding schools. Pintrest

French troops arrest a Native Algerian in 1945. La Tribune Diplomatique Internationale

11. The French Indulged in Violent Reprisals at Setif

After the unrest was suppressed in the Setif region and order was restored, French authorities carried out brutal reprisals against native Algerians. French soldiers performed a ratissage, or “raking over” of Algerian rural communities suspected of involvement in the unrest, in which thousands were shot in summary executions. Simultaneously, French settlers went on a vigilante rampage in which they lynched Algerians seized from local jails, randomly shot natives out of hand, tortured them to death, or doused them in fuel and set them on fire.

French settlers in Algeria. Daily Advent

Humiliation routinely accompanied the repression. Algerian men were frequently forced to kneel in front of a French flag, then made to shout “We are dogs” before they were led away, never to be seen again. By the time the violence finally came to an end weeks later, thousands of Algerian natives had perished. The exact numbers are unknown, but most historians put the death toll of the tragic events at Setif within a range of 6,000 to 20,000, while some contemporary news sources put the figure as high as 45,000.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.