228 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
traditional academic funding provided the conditions of a sort of
perfect storm for the militarization of the discipline and the acad
emy as a whole." 21
In their ten-part cable television documentary series and seven
hundred-page companion book The Untold History of the United
States, filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick ask:
"Why does our country have military bases in every region of the
globe, totaling more than a thousand by some counts? Why does
the United States spend as much money on its military as the rest
of the world combined? Why does it still possess thousands of nu
clear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert, even though no nation
poses an imminent threat?" 22 These are key questions. Stone and
Kuznick condemn the situation but do not answer the questions.
The authors see the post-World War II development of the United
States into the world's sole superpower as a sharp divergence from
the founders' original intent and historical development prior to the
mid-twentieth century. They quote an Independence Day speech by
President John Quincy Adams in which he condemned British co
lonialism and claimed that the United States "goes not abroad, in
search of monsters to destroy." Stone and Kuznick fa il to mention
that the United States at the time was invading, subjecting, coloniz
ing, and removing the Indigenous farmers from their land, as it had
since its founding and as it would through the nineteenth century.
In ignoring that fundamental basis for US development as an impe
rialist power, they do not see that overseas empire was the logical
outcome of the course the United States chose at its founding.NORTH AMERICA IS A CRIME SCENE
Jodi Byrd writes: "The story of the new world is horror, the story
of America a crime." It is necessary, she argues, to start with the
origin of the United States as a settler-state and its explicit intention
to occupy the continent. These origins contain the historical seeds of
genocide. Any true history of the United States must focus on what
has happened to (and with) Indigenous peoples-and what still hap
pens.^2 3 It's not just past colonialist actions but also "the continued