Carlos Montezuma’s Wassaja Newsletter: Digitization, Access and Content

The Carlos Montezuma Wassaja Newsletter: Digitization, Access and Context project will produce a digital collection and exhibition containing several volumes of a newsletter, Wassaja, that Yavapai intellectual and activist Carlos Montezuma, MD (1866-1923) self-published during the years 1916-1922. Wassaja, which took Montezuma’s Yavapai birth name, meaning “signaling” or “beckoning,” 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. The project will also include additional material from the ASU archives that documents the different facets of Montezuma’s career as an Indian rights leader and his relationship to his home community of Fort McDowell, giving a wider context to Wassaja.