American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This article roots out the relationship between American power and masculine desire in the popular film Night at the Museum (2006), which is so powerful that Theodore Roosevelt’s gaze facilitates the Indian model of Sacagawea to come to life. It is Roosevelt’s (Robin Williams’s) gaze followed by the spectator’s eye that continues the fraught romantic trope of Indian-white relations, emptying out colonial violence and political realities. These contemporary simulations of Indians, just like Curtis’s early 1900 plates, are entangled in networks of power and capitalism. Indigenous simulations and performances have always been engaged in these circuits of capitalism and power structures.