By Ryan Quinn
Spring 2025
Carlos Montezuma was a Native writer and doctor who advocated for American citizenship for Native people in the early 20th century. He, along with other Native intellectuals such as Charles Eastman and Henry Roe Cloud, formed the Society of American Indians (SAI), an organization dedicated to advancing the rights of Native people. Montezuma and the rest of the SAI saw a future for Native people within American society instead of on the reservations, and they viewed citizenship as a critical step towards the social and economic elevation of Native people (Calloway 2024).
Each of the members of the SAI had their own way of advancing their cause, and this shone through in their respective writing styles. For instance, SAI co-founder and Seneca archaeologist Arthur C. Parker took the approach of aligning himself with white academia in his work “That the Smaller Peoples May Be Safe”, alternating between referring to Indians in the third person and including himself among them by using the word “we” (Parker 2015, Vigil 2015). In this blog post, we will focus instead on the writing style of Montezuma, who took a more direct, almost combative approach in his writings advocating for Native rights. In fact, his style was so blunt that it made others in the SAI uncomfortable, leading to Montezuma’s eventual departure from the organization. Afterwards, he founded the journal Wassaja so that he could continue speaking out in support of Native rights in his own way (Calloway 2024). Due to his strong professional ties and patronage from the upper class of Chicago, Montezuma was able to circulate Wassaja nationally to both Native and non-Native readers (Vigil 2015).
One prominent example of Montezuma’s direct writing style is his essay “Another Kaiser in America”, written in 1918 after he had already left the SAI (Montezuma 2015). The year is important since America had just defeated Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany in WWI, making Montezuma’s use of the word “Kaiser” to refer to American suppression of Native rights extremely combative (BBC 2014). Evidently, the point of the title was to grab the attention of his American audience and call their attention to the injustices in their own nation.
In the body of the essay, Montezuma argues both for American citizenship for Native people and for the dissolution of the Indian Bureau. He argues that the US was attempting to keep Native people on reservations, which he referred to as a form of “bondage”, despite their ultimate right to American citizenship as the original inhabitants of American territory (Montezuma 2015). He points to the Indian Bureau as the oppressive force keeping Native people on reservations, and thus calls for its dissolution. His argument for citizenship for Native people rests on the conflict between America’s emphasis on freedom and its denial of citizenship to Native people: “How can the liberty-loving country withhold any longer from the Indians their just rights?” (Montezuma 2015). Montezuma expresses a belief that citizenship will allow Native people to escape the reservations and carve a path to success in America (Montezuma 2015).
Throughout the essay, his language takes an accusatory tone. He questions how a nation founded on the idea of freedom for all can withhold citizenship from Native people, and his frequent use of all-caps adds to the intensity of his writing. He also portrays the plight of Native people under the Indian Bureau as worse than that of slaves and the nations which suffered during WWI. In general, his message is that America has committed grave sins, and the way to begin correcting those wrongs is to grant citizenship to Native people and abolish the Indian Bureau (Montezuma 2024).
In another essay titled “What Indians Must Do”, Montezuma takes a less combative tone, but remains just as direct. This essay focuses on the Indian Bureau specifically, depicting it as a domineering force that prevents Native people from being independent as they were in the past. With no sugarcoating, he criticizes the Bureau for appropriating natural resources, stealing money, and covering up its mistreatment of Native people in public announcements (Montezuma 2024). He also insists that Native people must fully participate in American society or risk being wiped out; to use Montezuma’s own words, he urges Native people to “get out of it and hustle for our salvation”, referring to the need to get out of reservations (Montezuma 2024). He also invokes his own Indian heritage for credibility, referring to himself as a “full-blooded Apache Indian” to close out his argument (Montezuma 2024).
Just from these two essays, Carlos Montezuma’s vision for the future of Native people is clear. His vision was that Native people should be free from the oversight of the Indian Bureau and be able to carve their own paths through American society with the benefits of full American citizenship supporting them along the way. Montezuma often speaks of Native people as a collective “race” when making this point, adopting a pan-Indian stance by treating Native people as a collective group in the fight for indigenous rights (Montezuma 2024, Virgil 2015). Ultimately, Montezuma pursued the same objective that many other Native writers of the time pursued in their own individual ways: advocating for the rights of Native people under the American government.
Bibliography
References
BBC. 2014. “History – Historic Figures: Wilhelm II (1859 – 1941).” BBC History. 2014. https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/wilhelm_kaiser_ii.shtml.
Calloway, Colin G. 2024. First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History. 7th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Montezuma, Carlos. 2015. “Another Kaiser in America.” In Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887, edited by Daniel M. Cobb, XX–XX. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. JSTOR, [suspicious link removed].
Montezuma, Carlos. 2024. “What Indians Must Do.” In First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History, edited by Colin G. Calloway, 7th ed., XX–XX. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Parker, Arthur C. 2015. “That the Smaller Peoples May Be Safe.” In Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887, edited by Daniel M. Cobb, XX–XX. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. JSTOR, [suspicious link removed].
Vigil, Kiara M. 2015. Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880-1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
