Indian activist and physician of Arizona and Chicago, Illinois.

Carlos Montezuma was born a Yavapai Indian in southern Arizona on or about 1866. As a boy he survived a murderous attack by rival Pimas, and was then sold to an itinerant Italian photographer named Carlos Gentile. Gentile changed the boy's name from Wassaja to Carlos Montezuma and took him east to New York and Illinois. As he grew up he was educated well enough to be able to attend the University of Illinois and eventually the Chicago Medical College, where he received his MD in 1889. While in medical school he began a long friendship and correspondence with Richard Henry Pratt, head of the famous Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, who became a major influence, encouraging him to dedicate himself to continue to work for the rights of Indians.

After several years working on western reservations for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Montezuma realized he was opposed to the Bureau's policy of maintaining and operating these reservations, feeling that Native Americans could only achieve their potential if given opportunities within the white, urban America. Thus began Montezuma's continual allegiance with the newly founded Society of American Indians and his role as a firm critic of the government's Bureau of Indian Affairs.

In 1896 Montezuma returned to Chicago to establish a medical practice and later, from 1916 to 1922, to publish a personal newsletter called Wassaja, in which he carried on his fight against the Bureau and his crusade for a place for Indians in twentieth century America. Active all his life as a national leader in Native American affairs, and well known both by his writings and his speeches, in 1922 Carlos Montezuma returned to Arizona to die of tuberculosis in 1923.

A biography by Peter Iverson, entitled Carlos Montezuma, was published in 1982.