Carlos Montezuma or Wassaja (c. 1866 – January 31, 1923) was a Yavapai-Apache Native American, 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 raiders along with other children to be sold or bartered. Wassaja was then purchased by an Italian photographer Carlo Gentile in Adamsville, for thirty silver dollars. 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.
Life and career
"I am a full-blooded Apache Indian, born around the year 1866... somewhere near Four Peaks, Arizona Territory", wrote Dr. Montezuma, introducing himself in a letter written in 1905 to the Smithsonian Institution. He was named "Wassaja" (which means "signaling" or "beckoning") by his parents. His father was a chief named Co-cu-ye-vah and his mother was named Thil-ge-ya. In October 1871, at the age of 5, he was captured by Pima raiders together with other children to be enslaved or bartered. Wassaja was brought to Adamsville, a mixed Anglo and Mexican village, and offered for thirty silver dollars to itinerant Italian photographer Carlo Gentile, who happened to be in the area for his ethnographic work on Native Americans. Gentile, a cultured and liberal man from Naples who had moved to America in the 1850s, adopted Wassaja as his own son and renamed him "Carlos Montezuma" as an enduring and proud reminder of the child's cultural heritage, partly after himself, partly from the Montezuma ruins near Adamsville.
In the following years, Wassaja/Carlos accompanied his adoptive father in his pioneering photographic and ethnographic expeditions in Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. For a few months in 1872–73 they even 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.
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 to Chicago. Being regularly homeschooled by Gentile and attending public schools in Chicago (1872–75), Galesburg (1875–77) and Brooklyn (1877–78), Wassaja had 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.
A precocious child, he devoted himself entirely to study. He graduated with honors from Urbana High School in 1879. Following one more year of preparatory work, he enrolled at the University of Illinois in 1880. He was only fourteen years old. At the University of Illinois he studied English, mathematics, German, physiology, microscopy, zoology, mineralogy, physics, physiology, mental science, logic, constitutional history, political economy, and geology, excelling in chemistry, which he took each quarter. Montezuma (or Monte as he was referred to by classmates) also began his public activity in support of Native Americans' rights. On May 5, 1883, the campus paper, The Illini, records a speech on Indian's Bravery Montezuma delivered the night before in Adelphic Hall in front of a large audience, in which "he likened the Indians to the Spartans at Thermopylae."
After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1884, Montezuma returned to Chicago. He there received his doctorate of medicine from the Chicago Medical College, a branch of Northwestern University, in 1889 and 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.