Currently on display at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Ancestors and Descendants: Ancient Southwestern America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, brings Tulane University’s vast archive of ethnographer and archeologist George Hubbard Pepper to public view for the first time.

The story of George Hubbard Pepper is, of itself, a fascinating one. He cuts an Indiana Jones-esque figure of a man; in one portrait he stands confident, his tie loosely knotted, a rifle at his feet and a snake in his hand. We are told the Navajo people named him “Hostine Klish,” or “Snake Man,” presumably in reference to his fearless approach to the desert reptiles. He considered the people he studied his friends and their lives his own.

With a natural passion for, and aptitude in his field, he left his home of Staten Island to study at the Peabody Museum of Harvard University. In 1896, at 23 years old, he was appointed Assistant Curator of the Department of the Southwestern at the Museum of Natural History. From there he led the excavation of the Pueblo Bonito ruins in New Mexico.

Over the following 10 years he extensively and meticulously studied several Native American tribes in the Southwest. As an archeologist he not only uncovered the ruins at Pueblo Bonito, but also hundreds of notable artifacts from the 12th to 14th Century. The unearthing of what amassed to a collection of 120 cylindrical jars led Pepper to note in his reports a potential connection between the people of Pueblo Bonito and the Mayans of Central America. Scientists have since confirmed the presence of cacao residue in the jars, but it was the shape and styling of these vessels alone led Pepper to make the connection. Such discoveries imply a likely exchange in spiritual beliefs and practices between the two groups.

This exhibition, a collaboration between Tulane University’s Middle American Research Institute (MARI) and the New Orleans Museum of Art contains an expansive history, far beyond Pepper and his own archeological research.

Shortly after Pepper’s death in 1924, his archives found their way to the then newly established MARI in what has been described as a “fluke.” The show’s curators, Paul J. Tarver and Cristin J. Nunez, explain the unusual circumstances that brought this archive to the New Orleans Museum of Art via Tulane University.

A man by the name of William E. Gates “must’ve known him, or known of him, for within months of his death, Gates orchestrated the purchase of Pepper’s private research collection and lecture collection from Pepper’s widow, Jessie Crellin Pepper.” Gates sold his collection to Tulane, and became the first director of the MARI and his collection became the institute’s first library, which included Pepper’s archive.

In 2008 the building where MARI’s collection was stored, Dinwiddie Hall, was overdue for renovations. The department contacted Paul Tarver to visit the new storage facilities at NOMA. At the time Tarver had an intern, Cristin J. Nunez, whose primary interest was Native American Art. What they discovered was an exhibition waiting to happen.

The notes, journals, photographs and glass lantern slides within the collection provide an extraordinary insight into the lives of both the explorers in the American Southwest and the Native American people they had come to study at the turn of the 20th Century. It was at this point that the actions of the two groups, along with the arrival of the railroad would cause life to change irreversibly for the Native American people.

Pepper’s own photographs, taken with a Kodak Brownie Camera document the lives of the explorers, often on their down time. A faintly humorous print shows well dressed men, smoking cigars, playing cards, reclined on a Navajo rug while carefully shielded from billowing sand. Another print, this time from Pepper’s collection of glass lantern slides, which he often used in his lectures, shows the explorers standing proud in their camp next to their own naively constructed oven. We are given an intimate insight into these pioneering men on their groundbreaking missions, at moments when they appear so evidently out of place in their surroundings. Concurrently we are shown Pepper’s humor, a dog resting at the entrance of a large clay oven, and his fascinations — the process of weaving rugs and molding pots, along with architectural elements such as hand crafted chimneys. 

One of the most striking elements of the archive are the masterful, delicate images of Southwestern life by expedition photographer Sumner W. Matteson. A scientist and bicycle salesmen from Iowa, Matteson trained himself in photography and spent the first decade of the 20th Century traveling the country with his cameras, often joining with Pepper’s expedition. His slides, particularly of the Hopi tribe’s “Snake Dance” are beautifully composed engaging images of a ritual so alien to much of America at the time. The ritual comprised the end of a several day ceremony conducted every two years in the hope of bringing rain. Later on, as American fascination with Native American culture grew, the Hopi tribe prevented public access to the ceremony.

But Matteson’s interests and eye goes beyond Pepper’s ethnography. In one image “Knitting and Courting Shongopaui Rooftop,” Matteson depicts a young couple in an intimate moment, seemingly unaware of the camera, faces concealed by their hair. There is no ritual, no striking costume or telling features, just a young couple together. As with many of his most notable images, this slide is meticulously hand-colored.

The archive is given even greater context with items from the collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art. Items ranging from detailed metalwork jewelry to fabrics and painted renditions of Native American sand paintings bolster ones impression of Pepper’s surroundings. A stereoscope image card (ostensibly a 3-D plaything) from the 1870s of a Navajo weaver at the loom evidences the middle and upper class fascination with Native American culture that is soon to follow.

The exhibitions organizers do not shy away from the changes that the Native Americans of the Southwest experienced as a result of American exploration and expansion. It is noted that the railroads which brought American’s west brought trade to the Navajo people. One image shows Native American women leaning up to the windows of a stopped train to sell their pots to enthused passengers, passengers on what can be presumed to be their first encounter with a culture they had heard of only from sources such as Pepper’s lectures.

An unavoidable truth is noted by the exhibitions organizers; the extraction of ancient objects by archeologists meant “later generations of Puebloans felt a strong disconnect from their ancient heritage,” and that it was not until the Native American Graves and Reparations Act of 1990 that excavated remains were returned to their rightful resting place.

This collaboration between MARI and the New Orleans Museum of Art provides a visually fascinating and academically exhaustive insight into a pivotal moment in Southwestern American history as we are drawn into the lives of not only those who were observed, but the incredible story of the men who observed them and how they shaped one another’s history.

Ancestors and Descendants: Ancient Southwestern America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century: Selections from the George Pepper Native American Archive at the Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University is on display at the New Orleans Museum of Art, One Collins C. Diboll Circle, City Park, New Orleans, Louisiana 70124, through October 24.