A 2001 exhibition called “Spirit Capture: Native Americans and the Photographic Image,” at the National Museum of the American Indian in Lower Manhattan, remains one of the most moving photography shows I’ve seen in New York in two decades. Culled from the museum’s permanent collection, it wasn’t about formal perfection or a singular sensibility. It was an archival look at a group of people as they were historically portrayed through a visual medium they didn’t invent and, until recently, rarely used. Indeed, it was a show about how that medium invented and used them, or rather stereotyped images of them — the recalcitrant savage, the timeless primitive, the vanishing race — to create an official American saga from a victor’s point of view.

Many of the pictures dated back almost a century and were taken by non-Indian ethnologists, missionaries and surveyors. A few, though, were by a Kiowa photographer named Horace Poolaw (1906-1984), and what a difference there was. No more savage, no more timeless, no more vanishing. Instead, we saw Native American life from the inside, people inventively fusing a complex cultural past with equally complex modern present. The perspective, so refreshing to find years ago, is now expanded and deepened in the museum’s current show “For a Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw.” It’s an instant candidate for the long-term memory bank.

Mr. Poolaw was born in a close-knit Kiowa community in rural Oklahoma on the cusp of major changes in both Native and American life. Terrible things had happened. The Wounded Knee massacre was in the recent past when Mr. Poolaw was young. Chiricahua Apaches were still held as prisoners of war at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. The United States government had sliced up reservations in an effort to break down tribal cohesiveness and force Indians to assimilate into mainstream American society, which had stresses of its own with a changing economy, waves of immigration and European war not far in the future.

Assimilation was happening, though not necessarily as the government planned. It was taking place on Native American schedules and terms. Mr. Poolaw’s father was a United States Army scout at Fort Sill, but he also assumed the roles of medicine man and tribal historian for the Kiowa. The merging of worlds, at a grass-roots level, became the coincidental subject of Mr. Poolaw’s photographs.