Carlos Montezuma
Carlos Montezuma, originally named Wassaja, was born in the mid-1860s to Yavapai parents in Arizona. His childhood was marked by conflict as indigenous peoples faced encroachment from European American settlers. Abducted by Pimas in 1871, Wassaja was rescued by photographer Carlos Gentile, who renamed him Carlos Montezuma and took him to Chicago. After earning a degree in chemistry and later a medical degree, Montezuma engaged with the assimilationist agenda of the government, serving in various medical roles across different Indian agencies.
However, his experiences led him to advocate fiercely for indigenous rights, culminating in the creation of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Reservation in 1903. Montezuma’s political activism included forming alliances with other indigenous intellectuals to challenge the oppressive policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He published a newsletter, Wassaja, to call for citizenship rights and economic empowerment for Native Americans. Despite his initial successes, Montezuma faced challenges in the later years of his life, including deteriorating health due to tuberculosis. He passed away in 1923, and while he garnered some recognition posthumously, it wasn’t until the late 20th century that his contributions to indigenous resistance were fully acknowledged.
Subject Terms
Carlos Montezuma
- Born: c. 1867
- Birthplace: Superstition Mountains of central Arizona
- Died: January 31, 1923
- Place of death: Fort McDowell Reservation, Arizona
Tribal affiliation: Yavapai
Significance: Montezuma was one of the first American Indians to earn a physician’s degree and practice European American medicine on reservations
In the mid-1860’s, Carlos Montezuma was born to Yavapai parents in central or southern Arizona. He received the name “Wassaja,” meaning “signaling” or “beckoning.” Wassaja’s childhood was far from peaceful, as during that decade European Americans were mining and settling the area and indigenous peoples were maintaining warfare with one another. In 1871, Pimas attacked the Yavapai and abducted Wassaja to Mexico. He never saw his natural parents again, but a photographer named Carlos Gentile purchased the boy out of pity. Gentile had the boy christened “Carlos Montezuma” and took him to Chicago.
After schooling in Chicago and Galesburg, Illinois, and a brief stay in Brooklyn, Montezuma found himself back in Urbana, Illinois, as the ward of a Baptist minister, William Steadman. Under such tutelage he prepared for college, matriculated at the University of Illinois, and earned a degree in chemistry. After a brief period of uncertainty, Montezuma enrolled at the Chicago Medical College. By 1889, he had completed his medical training.
Even before finishing his training, Montezuma was in touch with Captain Richard Henry Pratt, the head of the assimilationist Carlisle Indian School. Pratt immediately took an interest in Carlos as living proof of the value of “civilizing” the Indians. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Jefferson Morgan did the same and in 1889 he appointed Montezuma as a clerk and physician at Fort Stevenson in the Dakota Territory. From there, Montezuma moved on to the Western Shoshone Agency in Nevada and the Colville Agency in Washington. At each place, however, his philosophy of Indian rights clashed with that of government agents, missionaries, and tribal shamans. By 1893, he was in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as the school’s physician, a post he kept until 1896 when he ventured into private practice. Montezuma had a happier time at Carlisle, although he suffered a romantic spurning from the prominent Sioux woman Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin).
Once outside the Indian Service, Montezuma began to devote his energies to political activism on behalf of indigenous causes. He helped create the Fort McDowell Yavapai (or Mojave-Apache) Reservation in 1903. By 1905, he was attracting attention as a national Indian leader. Suspicious of the assimilationist agenda of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Montezuma joined with other like-minded indigenous intellectuals to form a loose front insisting on tribal peoples’ control of their destiny. Although he was never completely at ease with the progressivist Society of American Indians that emerged in 1911, Montezuma moved in and out of the organization over the next four years or so. By 1915, however, his political views took him out of the progressivist camp. Convinced that the Bureau of Indian Affairs was a fraud that deprived indigenous people of land and livelihood, Carlos sharpened his attack on the agency, calling for its abolition and ridiculing those indigenous leaders who cooperated with it. To this end, he began publishing a newsletter, Wassaja, in 1916. Over the next seven years until his death, Montezuma crusaded for citizenship rights for Indians and economic protection of tribal people, especially in his native Arizona. His was not a call for a nativist resurrection of old tribal ways; instead, he sought political autonomy and the economic empowerment of his people in the context of modern America. When by 1918 the Society of American Indians was beginning to embrace his views, he rejoiced. His elation proved short-lived when the movement began to lose its clout nationally. Personal matters, such as his attempt to enroll as a San Carlos Apache (because some genealogical searching led him to believe his parents had ended up with that tribe), foundered as well.
By the summer of 1922, Montezuma’s health had deteriorated significantly. He diagnosed his condition as tuberculosis and headed back to Arizona. There, shunning European American medicine, he lingered in a wickiup until his death on January 31, 1923. Several newspapers and indigenous leaders, as well as the Society of American Indians, eulogized him, but the memory of his passions faded quickly. Not until the late 1960’s and early 1970’s did scholars and indigenous leaders rediscover Carlos Montezuma and his earlier form of resistance to European American domination.