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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- All Subjects: Water rights--Arizona
Montezuma urges Mike Burns and the McDowell Indians to keep McDowell land and Verde River water; NOT to move to Salt River Reservation as proposed.
Letter to Montezuma from his friend Joshua Russell describing the farming conditions at Santan, Arizona, including irrigation water, crops of wheat, hay, corn and watermelon, and lack of fencing wire for allotted land.
Mike Burns and the leaders of the McDowell community entreat Montezuma to help them stay on their land and help them go to Washington D.C. to request a dam for the irrigation of their land. They also ask him for advice about allotment.
In the letter, Montezuma defends the water rights of the Fort McDowell community and the construction of a proposed dam, and states emphatically that "it is not their wish to move."