Night at Whose Museum? Settler Colonial Fantasy in Night at the Museum | Estelle Yim

Oh, that’s problematic.
–Theodore Roosevelt, Night at the Museum (2006)        

    In “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” Eve Tuck and K.W. Yang describe settler adoption fantasies as those stories “in the settler colonial imagination in which the Native (understanding that he is becoming extinct) hands over his land, his claim to the land, his very Indian-ness to the settler for safe-keeping.”[1] These are the stories told by the colonizer which allow them to absorb Indigenous culture, knowledge, and peoples without needing or wanting to actually understand and humanize Indigenous people. They reference the film analysis conducted by Sara Ahmed as an example of a fantasy in which the story serves to “confirm the white man’s position as hero of the story.”[2] Here, I locate another colonial fiction in the 2006 movie Night at the Museum, which follows the story of the night guard Larry Daley at the Museum of Natural History in New York City who stumbles upon an entire society of artifacts that come to life at night. I aim to draw attention to what kinds of harmful narratives can arise when museums place Indigenous artifacts in adjacent and marginal spaces to dominant and centered colonial collections. By focusing on the film’s unrealistic story of colonial love between a US president and an Indigenous woman, I argue that a harrowing settler adoption fantasy came to life in this fictional museum because of how the colonizer and the colonized were forced together without any acknowledgement of the inherent violence in doing so.

    Museums, with their maze-like floors, seemingly endless displays, and frustratingly early closing hours beg their visitors to wonder what could possibly happen in them when nobody is around. The movie Night at the Museum realizes this fantasy, but to problematic ends, indeed. In the film, Sacagawea is quite literally on the brink of extinction along with the rest of the museum that is about to lose the artifact that grants them life. More important to the introduction of the settler fantasy, however, is that in the beginning of the movie, we see her confined – obediently accompanying Lewis and Clark  – behind a glass wall where she cannot even be heard (the main character wonders, “was she deaf?... because she does seem a little bit sort of unresponsive”).[3] This barrier, simultaneously transparent and impermeable, renders the value of her existence to its visibility, to the voyeuristic invitation to observe (and maybe, even, to know) her without any concern that her actual voice might interrupt whatever projection anyone can envision and subject her to. 

    This is made clear by the way Theodore Roosevelt – whose wax figure, with sword held high, sits astride a rearing horse in the direction of, presumably, the American empire’s stolen lands as well as the new lands he hopes to conquer – moves freely about the museum but chooses to spend every night spying through the glass pane with his binoculars, pining for Sacagawea and watching (over) her from his paternalistic, fetishizistic, and white saviorist – and importantly, distanced – gaze. After “sacrificing” his “life” to save her, the heroic “Teddy” is able to articulate his feelings for Sacagawea: “you’re worth saving, my dear.”[4] This cements the unsettling depiction of romance between the man who led several militant colonial escapades and the woman who was one of two enslaved Shoshone women bought to be wives to the French Canadian trader, Touissant Charbonneau.[5] By the end of the story, Sacagawea has used her skills to repair Roosevelt’s wounds. And because they are unfatal, given that he is made of wax, this interaction, too, highlights the unique eery immortality of his night form; although all other human depictions in the museum, including Sacagawea, are susceptible to fatal wounds and death, Roosevelt embodies the eternal life that is granted to the colonial project and its leaders. 

    Night at the Museum’s Sacagawea indeed gives up her whole self to the settler colonial fantasy in accepting and claiming her place in the tribal display in the museum. In ceding this home to the museum institution, curators, visitors, and their voyeurism and in voluntarily giving her life stories to them (“what do you want to know?”),[6] she places trust for her “safe-keeping” in a settler institution. Her place in the museum as a passive display cements the specific narrative of American history that relegates Indigenous existence to the past, to the controlled, and to the necessary prelude of the grand project of colonization. Although she joins the efforts against the predatory practices of museums to freely move, own, and hide or display artifacts, the museum/movie never really gives her a backstory or addresses the historical revisionism that has made her a girlboss of manifest destiny, who bravely paved the path across North America for colonial settlers in need her assistance. She takes up the same role in the movie by acting as Daley’s guide through the museum’s night life and helping him track down the movie’s antagonists, making possible his righteous quest to protect the territory that is where the museum’s nighttime society has settled. 

    The innocent love that drives Roosevelt to be Sacagawea’s hero is rooted in the Western distortion of romantic relationships as separate from the power dynamics that exist between individuals. What makes this relationship possible in the movie’s museum is his ability to watch her day and night to imagine and, eventually, realize his personal fantasy of conquering her through love. This love is indeed a colonial love, a fundamental contradiction to decolonial love, which is one that “highlights the importance of love as a counter to colonial violence and hatred of Indigenous peoples.”[7] Importantly, it is the positioning of the settler colonial fantasy with the settler colonial reality that allowed for such a one-sided love to burgeon. In practice, this is not dissimilar to how a museum visitor’s interaction with displays is about being the sole agent in the act of viewing. As information scholars and memory workers, we must critically examine the spaces that we curate and the stories that we inevitably force together in their literal physical proximity. If we are to really give life to liberatory stories and emancipatory futures, then we must practice a politics and pedagogy of refusal that does not allow for the creation and perpetuation of settler colonial fantasies. We must instead focus our energies on bringing the right stories to life, not just by night and out of sight, but by day and in the forefront of our realities and imaginations.

Figure 1. Night at the Museum screen capture of Sacagawea trying to speak to Larry Daley from behind the glass display case. [8]

Figure 2. Night at the Museum screen capture of Teddy Roosevelt's wax figure. [9]

Figure 3. Night at the Museum screen capture of Roosevelt's view of Sacagawea through his binoculars. [10]

Figure 4. Night at the Museum screen capture of Roosevelt walking up to Sacagawea from outside of the display case. [11]

________________

[1]Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (September 8, 2012): 14.

[2] Tuck and Yang, 14.

[3] Night at the Museum, directed by Shawn Levy (Twentieth Century Fox, 2006), 47:13, https://www.disneyplus.com/video/32082436-79a2-4eaa-b422-cf85038edd55.

[4] Night at the Museum, 1:30:45.

[5] Selene G. Phillips, “Mending Baskets: The Process of using Indigenous Epistemology to Reinterpret Sacagawea” (PhD diss., Purdue University, 2003), 61. 

[6] Night at the Museum, 1:37:04.

[7] Linda T. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 3rd ed. (Zed Books, 2021), 190.

[8] Night at the Museum, 27:17.

[9] Night at the Museum, 1:39:50.

[10] Night at the Museum, 38:33.

[11] Night at the Museum, 56:57.