“Americanism for Indians”: Carlos Montezuma’s “Immigrant Problem,” Wassaja, and the Limits of Native Activism

The Indian problem is a problem because the country has taken it and nursed it as a problem; otherwise it is not a problem at all.

—Carlos Montezuma, Wassaja, April 1916

I am speaking for these people because they cannot speak for themselves.

—Carlos Montezuma, Wassaja, March 1917

Of the Native intellectuals of the Progressive Era, Yavapai medical doctor, activist, and writer Carlos Montezuma (ca. 1866–1923) was one of the best-known Native Americans in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. Recent scholarship has positioned Montezuma’s cultural and political work around the Society of American Indians, Richard H. Pratt and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and the legacy of his work for the Fort McDowell community in Arizona. Literary scholars have also started to recover his poetry, speeches, essays, and editorial work in his political newspaper, Wassaja: Freedom’s Signal for the Indian (1916–1922), as well as his speeches and publications in the Society of American Indians journal, to uncover his commitment to Native activism, radicalism, and print culture. The recently renewed scholarly interest in Carlos Montezuma’s contributions to Indigenous studies more broadly, and print culture in particular, expands the scholarly attention to Montezuma’s work beyond his better-known commitment to Native activism and radicalism.¹

One overlooked focus of Montezuma’s work that has emerged in recent years is his investment in a popular topic of the Progressive Era: the perhaps surprising analogy between Native people and recent European immigrants. A medical doctor in Chicago—a city which his mentor, Richard H. Pratt, described in his letters as “so full of foreigners”—Montezuma often borrowed the Native Progressives’ argument for citizenship (as an end to wardship) as he developed his own analogy of the Native civic status to that of the European immigrant in his speeches and written essays to argue for the Americanization of Native people (Pratt to Montezuma, 27 August 1902). Montezuma’s argument offered not just a critique of both settlers’ and immigrants’ easier paths to assimilation and Americanization, but also signaled the deficient ways in which the so-called “Indian problem” was addressed in the United States by comparing it to the “immigrant problem.” At the time, immigration from southern and eastern Europe was at an all-time high. As Montezuma compared the Native and immigrant paths to citizenship and assimilation created by both local and federal organizations, he found the paths to citizenship for Native people grossly deficient.²

Throughout his career as a public Native intellectual, Montezuma expressed his assimilationist agenda unequivocally. He was an advocate for the Americanization of Native people—albeit a different version of Americanization than the one envisioned by white Progressive reformers for the new immigrants—at the same time that he engaged, in Kiara Vigil’s words, with both “Americanization and Indianization discourses” (138). Montezuma included Native perspectives in the letters and articles he published or reprinted in Wassaja, which carried the urgency of his message, as well as its rhetorical differences from peer Native publications, such as the more sanitized publications of the Society of the American Indians. Wassaja borrowed the radicalism of Montezuma’s earlier speech, “Let My People Go,” where he exploded:

We are wards, we are not free! In a free country we are not free; our heritage is freedom, but we are not free. Wake up, Indians, all over America! We are hoodwinked, duped more and more every year; we are made to feel free when we are not. We are chained hand and foot, we stand helpless, innocently waiting for the fulfillment of promises, that will never be fulfilled, in the overwhelming great ocean of civilization.

(“Let My People Go” 203–04)

Despite Montezuma’s and fellow members of the Society of the American Indians (SAI) disagreements on many issues, they agreed on the use of the immigrant analogy to signal the discrepancy in the respective groups’ paths to American citizenship, a concern which consumed Montezuma’s activist career. Although he passed away a year before the Indian...