Film director Paul Ranter was deep in research for his film “Moses on Mesa” when he found himself drawn into a world of forgotten faces. The film tells the story of a German-Jewish immigrant who fell in love with a Native American woman and eventually became governor of her tribe, the Acoma Pueblo, in New Mexico during the late 1800s. To understand that world, Ranter spent hours studying old photographs of indigenous people. What started as research turned into a personal mission.
Ranter began posting the photographs on his Facebook page with one specific goal: to help descendants identify their ancestors. Many of the images had been sitting in archives for over a century, captured by photographers like Edward S. Curtis, Walter McClintock, Roland W. Reed, and F.A. Rinehart. By colorizing them and sharing them widely, Ranter gave these portraits a new life and a new audience.
The photographs span dozens of tribes across the American West and Midwest — the Oglala Lakota, Blackfeet, Apache, Ojibwe, Crow, Zuni, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and more. Each image is a direct window into a specific time and place. These were not posed studio experiments. Many were taken on reservations, at tribal camps, and along riversides, documenting daily life as it was actually lived.
Walter McClintock was one of the most prolific photographers represented in this collection. Working in Montana in the early 1900s, he used glass lantern slides to capture the Blackfeet and Siksika people in extraordinary detail. His images show everything from painted tipis and tribal camps to individual men, women, and children going about their lives. McClintock had deep personal ties to the Blackfeet community, which gave his photographs an intimacy that many others of the era lacked.
Photographer F.A. Rinehart documented numerous tribal leaders and community members at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition held in Omaha, Nebraska in 1898. Many of the chiefs and tribal representatives photographed there had traveled significant distances to attend. Rinehart’s portraits of figures like Cheyenne Chief Wolf Robe and Geronimo of the Apache are among the most recognizable images in this collection.
Roland W. Reed worked primarily in Minnesota and Montana, producing hand-painted photo prints that were known for their artistic quality. His images of Ojibwe people along Minnesota waterways and Northern Plains men on Montana overlooks carry a painterly quality that sets them apart from documentary-style photography of the period. Reed’s careful use of color and light made his prints widely reproduced in the early 20th century.
The Oglala Lakota are well represented across this collection. Chief Little Wound, Bone Necklace, Charles American Horse, Chief Fast Horse, and Chief Little Wound all appear in formal portraits taken around 1899–1901. These were leaders photographed at a moment when the Lakota nation was navigating enormous political and cultural pressure following the end of the Plains Wars. The dignity in each portrait is unmistakable.
Some photographs document intimate, everyday moments. A Blackfoot couple walking together in Montana. A woman identified as “Coming Running” with her children. Walks-in-the-water holding her baby Koumiski, whose name translates to “Round Face.” These are not political portraits or ceremonial documents — they are pictures of people living their lives, and the colorization makes that humanity feel immediate.
The Blackfeet photographs taken by McClintock in Montana are especially varied. They include images of riders carrying coup sticks, families gathered near decorated tipis, children identified by name, and a night-herder watching from a lookout butte above the Old Man’s River. The Thunder Tipi of Brings-Down-the-Sun and the Red Stripe Tipi appear in separate images, each one a record of a specific family’s ceremonial property and identity.
Edward S. Curtis, one of the most famous photographers of Native American life, contributed at least one image to this collection — a portrait of Si Wa Wata Wa, a Zuni elder from New Mexico, taken in 1903. Curtis spent decades traveling across North America documenting indigenous peoples and produced thousands of photographs. His work remains both celebrated for its detail and debated for its staging of traditional scenes.
The collection also includes one of the most famous faces in American history: Geronimo (Goyaalé), the Apache leader, photographed by F.A. Rinehart in 1898. By that point, Geronimo had been a prisoner of war for twelve years. He was in his 70s when Rinehart photographed him at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition. The portrait captures a man who had outlived the wars that defined his life and was now being exhibited as a historical figure to crowds of fairgoers.
New Mexico features prominently throughout the collection, connecting back to Ranter’s original research. The Acoma Pueblo, photographed by the Chicago Transparency Company in the early 1900s, shows the ancient village perched on its sandstone mesa — the same setting at the heart of “Moses on Mesa.” Taos Pueblo also appears, in a 1905 image by Carl Moon showing a medicine man with a patient.
Some images in the collection document specific ceremonies and spiritual practices. Piegan men are shown giving prayer to the Thunderbird near a Montana river in 1912. The Thunder Tipi, a ceremonially significant structure within Blackfoot camps, appears in multiple photographs. These images were taken by outsiders, but photographers like McClintock, who lived among the Blackfeet for extended periods, captured details that purely commercial photographers never reached.
Chief Hollow Horn Bear of the Sicangu Lakota, photographed in 1905 by Delancey W. Gill, is another standout portrait. Hollow Horn Bear was a warrior who fought in the Battle of Powder River in 1876. By 1905, he had become a prominent political figure and would later ride in Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 inaugural parade. His photograph, colorized and brought forward in time, shows a man who moved between two very different worlds.
I need to find old photo of native American man in blue and native American woman in yellow