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Carlos Montezuma or Wassaja (c. 1866 – January 31, 1923) was a Yavapai people-Apache Native American physician, activist, and founding member of the Society of American Indians. His birth name, Wassaja, means "Signaling" or "Beckoning" in his native tongue. Wassaja was kidnapped by Pima people raiders along with other children to be sold or bartered. In 1871, Wassaja was then purchased by Italian photographer Carlo Gentile in Adamsville for thirty silver dollars at the age of 5 or 6 years old. Gentile renamed him "Carlos Montezuma". Montezuma was the first Native American student at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University, and only the second Native American ever to earn a medical degree in an American University after Susan La Flesche Picotte. Wassaja was the first Native American male to receive a medical degree. Until his death Wassaja fought to support the rights of his Yavapai people and other Native Americans.
In the following years, Wassaja accompanied his adoptive father in his pioneering photographic and ethnographic expeditions in Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. For a few months in 1872 and 1873, they joined the theatrical troupe of Ned Buntline and Buffalo Bill, where the boy Wassaja was featured as Azteka, the Apache-child of Cochise in the Wild West melodrama The Scouts of the Prairie in cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, while Gentile produced and sold promotional cartes de visite of the cast members.Palmquist, Peter E.; Kailbourn, Thomas R. (2000) Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: A Biographical Dictionary 1840-1865. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Gentile and Montezuma resided in Chicago and then New York for some years until the loss of all his belongings in a fire in 1877 forced Gentile back to his itinerant life and on to Chicago. Being regularly homeschooled by Gentile and attending public schools in Chicago (1872–1875), Galesburg (1875–1877), and Brooklyn (1877–1878), Wassaja had been revealed to be a committed and talented student. Realizing that he needed a more permanent setting to complete his education, in the fall of 1878 Gentile asked for the assistance of the Reverend George W. Ingalls of the Indian Department of the American Baptist Home Mission Society. Wassaja was placed in the care of Baptist minister William H. Steadman, of Urbana, Illinois, while Gentile was busy reviving his business as a photographer and editor in Chicago.
After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1884, Montezuma returned to Chicago. He received his doctorate of medicine from the Chicago Medical College, a branch of Northwestern University, in 1889. Montezuma obtained his license to practice that same year. Montezuma was not only the first Native American student at both the University of Illinois and Northwestern University, but also the second Native American ever to earn a Medical Degree in an American University after Susan La Flesche Picotte (1889). Wassaja was the first Native American man to receive a medical degree.
On October 27, 1893, Wassaja's adoptive father, Carlo Gentile, died in Chicago.Rumors of suicide in later literature (see Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography by Dan L. Thrapp are not confirmed either in the letters Montezuma exchanged with Gentile's widow, or in the obituary published in The Eye of November 11, 1893, where it is said the Gentile "suffered from Bright disease". Montezuma had last visited Gentile in the summer of 1893 while traveling from the State of Washington to his new job at Carlisle. Being now in Pennsylvania, Montezuma was not able to attend the funeral. He gave financial aid to Gentile's widow and in an ironic twist of fate, he became for some time the custodian of Gentile's six-year-old son (also named Carlos) until Gentile's widow and the child moved to California by 1896.Marino, Cesare (1998). The Remarkable Carlo Gentile: Italian Photographer of the American Frontier. Nevada City, California: Carl Mautz Publishing.
At the beginning of 1896 Dr. Montezuma left Pratt to return to Chicago and start private medical practice. In 1900, he traveled as a team doctor with Coach Pop Warner's National Champion Carlisle Indian School football team back to Arizona for the first time since his childhood. The following year he was again in Arizona on his own, contacting long-lost relatives he had not seen since his abduction. Montezuma's hatred for the reservations softened once he saw how connected his people were to their ancestral land and understood that they considered it home. Thereafter, he joined the Yavapai struggle that led to the creation of the Fort McDowell Yavapai or Mohave-Apache Reservation by late 1903. In 1904, Dr. Montezuma founded the Indian Fellowship League, the first urban Indian organization in the U.S., in Chicago.
1905, Carlos Montezuma attracted national attention as an Indian leader. He began publicly attacking the government for the conditions imposed upon Natives. He became an outspoken opponent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). In addition, he helped found the Society of American Indians in 1911, the first Indian rights organization created by and for Indians. In 1916 he started a monthly magazine titled Wassaja that he used as a platform to spread his views of the BIA and Native American education, civil rights and citizenship.
The Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation in 1996 named their new health care facility the Dr. Carlos Montezuma, Wassaja Memorial Health Center.* (2025). 9780972653541, Arnica Publishing. ISBN 9780972653541 In 2015, the University of Illinois announced that it would be naming its newest residence hall in his honor. The naming included former Chancellor Phyllis Wise meeting with the Peoria tribe, originally from Illinois but relocated to Oklahoma by the Indian Relocation Act, in order to improve Native American relations on campus.
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