Carlos Montezuma's Wassaja Newsletter
The Carlos Montezuma collection contains several digitized volumes of the Wassaja newsletter that Yavapai intellectual and activist Carlos Montezuma, MD (1866-1923) self-published during the years 1916-1922. Wassaja means “signaling” or “beckoning,” and is Montezuma’s Yavapai birth name. The newsletter was a vital source of news about Indian affairs in an era that had few outlets for such information and contains valuable reports directly from people living within the Indian reservation system. As a prominent figure in the struggle for Indian rights who played a role in the founding of the Society of American Indians, Montezuma was an intellectual leader against Indian Bureau mismanagement; he was notorious for advocating an end to the reservation system and the abolition of the BIA. This collection helps to document different facets of Montezuma’s career as an Indian rights leader and his relationship to his home community of Fort McDowell.
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A lecture given by Montezuma on the virtues of menthol, namely on the salve of menthol and Vaseline he invented to relieve lung problems, colds, etc. He notes the higher prevalence of lung complaints among Indians but says it is due to the rigors of reservation life. He is clearly addressing an audience of fellow physicians. He explains that he invented the menthol salve as a replacement for the "hot poultices" of the period: on the reservation where his patients lived an average of forty miles apart from each other, the conventional hot poultices made of mustard, linseed oil or even raw meat would be rendered cold and ineffective and would lack the healthful effect of the menthol vapor. The lecture is undated: It is signed "Carlos Montezuma, Carlisle PA" so I assume this lecture originates from his tenure as the staff physician at Carlisle, sometime from 1893-1896. Date on record is approximate.