[The U.S. government] was tired of treaties. They were tired of sacred hills. They were tired of ghost dances. And they were tired of all the inconveniences of the Sioux. So they brought out their cannons. ‘You want to be an Indian now?’ they said, finger on the trigger.

Aaron Huey, an American photojournalist, used this language in public talks and presentations about U.S. history and contemporary conditions on the Pine Ridge Reservation, home to the Oglala Lakota (Sioux). The passage evokes the late-19th-century escalation of federal repression after repeated treaty violations and land seizures, referencing conflicts over the Black Hills (“sacred hills”) and the Ghost Dance movement, which U.S. authorities treated as a threat. Huey’s phrasing culminates in an image of state violence (“cannons… finger on the trigger”), pointing toward the massacre at Wounded Knee (1890) as a symbolic endpoint of that era’s policy toward the Sioux.

The quote compresses decades of U.S.–Lakota relations into a blunt indictment: when Indigenous people asserted treaty rights, religious practice, and attachment to sacred land, the government framed these as “inconveniences” and answered with force. The repeated “tired of…” suggests impatience with legal and moral obligations, implying that treaties and promises were treated as disposable once they obstructed expansion. The taunting question—“You want to be an Indian now?”—highlights coercive assimilation: Indigenous identity is cast as something punishable when it resists state demands. Huey’s rhetoric aims to connect historical violence to ongoing structural harms faced by Sioux communities.