WASSAJA: Long Fight for Native Rights
- MIP Author
- 1 day ago
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Dr. Carlos Montezuma, born Wassaja near Four Peaks around 1866, was a Yavapai physician, publisher, and nationally recognized advocate for Native rights. He helped establish the Society of American Indians, used his newsletter Wassaja to attack federal control over Native lives, and defended the land and water of the Fort McDowell Yavapai community.
Two names run through his story. Carlos Montezuma was the name known in universities, medical offices, and political circles. Wassaja, translated as “signaling” or “beckoning,” was the name given to him before he was taken from his family.
Taken from Arizona
In 1871, when Wassaja was about five years old, he was captured during a raid attributed in historical accounts to Akimel O’odham people, usually called “Pima” in records from the period. He was separated from his Yavapai family and sold in Adamsville, Arizona Territory, to Carlo Gentile, an Italian photographer.
Gentile renamed him Carlos Montezuma and took him east. Montezuma spent much of his childhood in Illinois, far from the Four Peaks landscape, language, and relatives he had known. The later story of academic and professional success begins with that loss.
Montezuma is remembered today as Yavapai, although archival records and some of his own writings also identify him as Apache. The variation reflects both the inconsistent terminology used in historical records and the disruption caused by his childhood separation. Maurice Crandall, an enrolled member of the Yavapai-Apache Nation, examines this complicated search for identity in “Wassaja Comes Home: A Yavapai Perspective on Carlos Montezuma’s Search for Identity.”
From Illinois to Medicine
Montezuma entered the University of Illinois in 1880 when he was approximately fourteen years old. He studied chemistry, wrote for the student newspaper, participated in the Adelphic Debate Society, and became president of his class. When he graduated in 1884, he became the university’s first Native American graduate.
He continued his education at Chicago Medical College, now part of Northwestern University, and received his medical degree in 1889. He became Northwestern’s first Native American graduate and one of the earliest Native Americans to earn a medical degree from a United States university.
After graduation, Montezuma worked for the Office of Indian Affairs as a physician at several western posts. His final federal assignment was at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where he served from 1893 to 1895. In 1896, he left government service and opened a private medical practice in Chicago.
His years within the federal Indian system gave him a close view of the government’s authority over Native health care, education, land, and everyday life. By the time he returned to private practice, he had become one of the Indian Bureau’s most persistent critics.
A Difficult and Changing Political Vision Fighting for Native Rights
Montezuma’s political views cannot be placed neatly into a modern category. He supported United States citizenship, Western education, and greater freedom for Native individuals. At times, he also used the language of assimilation shared by many reformers of his generation.
At the same time, he condemned the Indian Bureau’s paternalism and argued that federal officials exercised too much control over Native people. He opposed the reservation system as it was administered by the government, but his growing relationship with his Yavapai relatives also deepened his understanding of their attachment to their homeland.
In 1911, Montezuma helped establish the Society of American Indians, one of the first national advocacy organizations created and led primarily by Native people. Its members included physicians, attorneys, educators, writers, ministers, and political organizers from numerous Tribal Nations.
Some of these activists have been described as the “Red Progressives.” This was not the name of a separate organization, nor did its members share a single political position. They debated citizenship, education, federal employment, religious freedom, the reservation system, and the future of Tribal communities. Montezuma’s fierce opposition to the Indian Bureau sometimes placed him in conflict with other Native leaders, including members of the Society.
Wassaja Sends a Signal
In 1916, Montezuma began publishing Wassaja: Freedom’s Signal for the Indians. The newsletter returned his Yavapai birth name to public view and gave him an independent platform from which to challenge federal Indian policy.
Writing from Chicago, Montezuma addressed citizenship, education, land, civil rights, reservation conditions, and the failures of the Indian Bureau. The publication could be direct and confrontational. Montezuma was not trying to present a comfortable image of Native life for non-Native readers. He wanted people to understand the consequences of policies created without Native consent.
The newsletter appeared from 1916 through 1922. Surviving issues now provide an important record of Native political writing during the Progressive Era. Digital copies are preserved through collections at the Newberry Library, the University of Arizona, and Arizona State University.
The name taken from him as a child became the name he printed across the top of every issue.
Defending Fort McDowell
While Montezuma built a medical career in Chicago, much of his later activism returned to Arizona. Business interests wanted access to Yavapai land and water along the Verde River, while the Office of Indian Affairs considered relocating the Fort McDowell community to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa reservation.
The proposal was opposed by both communities. Montezuma used his national contacts, legal arguments, correspondence, and public reputation to support his Yavapai relatives. His work helped stop the removal and protect Fort McDowell land and water from outside claims.
This fight complicates the familiar description of Montezuma as simply an assimilationist. He remained critical of federal reservation policy, but he also recognized that Fort McDowell was not merely a government designation. It was the homeland of his relatives and a place to which their community had enduring ties.
By 1922, Montezuma was seriously ill with tuberculosis. He left Chicago and returned to Fort McDowell, where he died on January 31, 1923. After spending most of his life away from Arizona, Wassaja spent his final weeks among his Yavapai relatives.
Remembering Wassaja at MIP
Montezuma’s life reaches from Four Peaks and Fort McDowell to Illinois, Chicago, Carlisle, and the center of national Native political organizing. Yet Arizona remained at the heart of his story.
For the Museum of Indigenous People in Prescott, Wassaja’s life offers a way to understand Native history through the words and decisions of a Native leader. He was not simply acted upon by government policy. He studied it, worked within it, argued against it, published his own position, and fought to protect his people’s homeland.
His story also resists the idea that Indigenous history belongs only to an unnamed or distant past. Native physicians, publishers, attorneys, educators, and organizers were debating citizenship, land, water, education, and self determination while Arizona was moving from territory to statehood.
Sources
Maurice Crandall, Yavapai-Apache Nation, “Wassaja Comes Home: A Yavapai Perspective on Carlos Montezuma’s Search for Identity”, Journal of Arizona History, Vol. 55, No. 1, Spring 2014.
University of Arizona Wassaja Carlos Montezuma Center for Native American Health, “About Wassaja/Carlos Montezuma”.
University of Illinois, “Carlos Montezuma: First Native American Alumnus of the University of Illinois”.
Northwestern University Galter Health Sciences Library, “Pathways in Medicine”.
National Library of Medicine, “Carlos Montezuma: Native American M.D., Author”.
Arizona State University Humanities Institute, “Carlos Montezuma’s Wassaja Newsletter: Digitization, Access and Content”.
Newberry Library, Carlos Montezuma Papers.
David Martínez, Gila River Indian Community, “A Yavapai Night to Remember: Presenting to Carlos Montezuma’s Ancestral Community”, University of Arizona Press.
National Library of Medicine, “Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte”.
Editorial Accuracy Note
The exact year of Montezuma’s birth is uncertain. Historical sources give dates between 1865 and 1867, so the article uses “around 1866.” Several institutions identify Montezuma as the first Native American man to earn a medical degree. A 2026 National Park Service historical study, however, notes that Choctaw Academy alumnus Joel Barrow may have earned a Western medical degree in 1844. To avoid overstating a disputed claim, the article identifies Montezuma as one of the earliest Native American physicians while retaining his documented distinctions as the first Native American graduate of the University of Illinois and Northwestern University.
