Kateri Tekakwitha (1656 – April 17, 1680) was a Mohawk woman who converted to Catholicism. Committing to live as a virgin, she became known for her devotion to Jesus Christ, diligent work ethic, and dedicated prayers for her fellow Native people. She was canonized in 2012, becoming the first Native American saint. She is known as "the Lily of the Mohawks", "the Protectress of Canada", and "the Genevieve of New France".
Born in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, in present-day New York, she and her family contracted smallpox in an epidemic; she was the only one of the family to survive, but had scarring on her face. She was influenced by French Jesuit missionaries and converted to Catholicism at age 19, taking the baptismal name Catherine (or Kateri).
After taking a vow of perpetual virginity, she left her village, and moved to the Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake, just south of Montreal. There she died five years later, respected for her piety and good works.
She was beatified in 1980 by Pope John Paul II, and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI at Saint Peter's Basilica on 21 October 2012, along with six others: Jacques Berthieu, Pedro Calungsod, Giovanni Battista Piamarta, Maria of Mt Carmel Salles y Barangueras, Marianne of Molokaʻi, and Anna Schäffer.
Early life and education
She was born around 1656 in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, in what is now northeastern New York. Her given name was Tekakwitha or Tekaouïta, meaning "she who bumps into things" in the Mohawk language.
She was the daughter of Kenneronkwa, a Mohawk chief, and Kahenta, an Algonquin woman who had been captured in a raid and then adopted and assimilated into the tribe. Kahenta had been baptized Catholic and educated by French missionaries in Trois-Rivières, east of Montreal. Mohawk warriors captured her and took her to their homeland. Kahenta eventually married Kenneronkwa. Tekakwitha was the first of their two children. A brother followed.
Tekakwitha's original village was highly diverse. The Mohawks absorbed captured Native people of other tribes, particularly their competitors, the Hurons, to replace people who died from warfare and diseases.
When Tekakwitha was around four years old, her parents and her brother died of smallpox. Tekakwitha survived, but suffered from facial scars and impaired eyesight. Due to her scars, she wore head covering and cloths to cover them. She was soon adopted and went to live with her father's sister and her husband, a chief of the Turtle Clan.
At age 11, Tekakwitha was visited by three members of the Society of Jesus. Tekakwitha was greatly impressed by these Jesuits, who were likely the first white Christians she had encountered in her life. Tekakwitha began to lead a life according to the teachings of the three Jesuits. She was staying with an uncle at the time, and he and other people of her tribe opposed her conversion.
The Jesuits' account of Tekakwitha said that she was a modest girl who avoided social gatherings and covered her head because of her scars. She was skilled at making clothing, weaving mats, preparing food and other traditional women's arts. As was the custom, she was pressured to think about marriage around age thirteen, but she refused. When speaking to her confessor, she stated, "I can have no spouse but Jesus." She followed by proclaiming, "I have the strongest aversion to marriage."
Upheaval and invasions Tekakwitha grew up in a period of upheaval, as the Mohawks interacted with French and Dutch colonists, who were competing in the lucrative fur trade. Trying to make inroads in Iroquois territory, the French attacked the Mohawks in present-day central New York in 1666. After driving the people from their homes, the French burned the three Mohawk villages. Tekakwitha, around ten years old, fled with her new family.Daniel Sargent, Catherine Tekakwitha, Longmans, Green & Co., New York, 1936, p. 164.
After being defeated by the French forces, the Mohawks accepted a peace treaty that required them to tolerate Jesuit missionaries in their villages. The Jesuits established a mission near present-day Auriesville, New York. They spoke of Christianity in terms with which the Mohawsk could identify.
The Mohawsk rebuilt Caughnawaga on the north bank of the river later named for them. (The present-day town of Fonda, New York developed just east of here in the mid-18th century.) In 1667, when Tekakwitha was 11 years old, she met Jesuit missionaries Jacques Frémin, Jacques Bruyas, and Jean Pierron, who had come to the village. Her uncle opposed any contact with them because he did not want her to convert to Christianity. One of his older daughters had already become Catholic.
In the summer of 1669, several hundred Mohican warriors, advancing from the east, launched an attack on Caughnawaga. Tekakwitha, at that point around 13 years old, joined other girls to help priest Jean Pierron tend to the wounded, bury the dead, and carry food and water.Francis X. Weiser, Kateri Tekakwitha, Kateri Center, Caughnawaga, Canada, 1972, pp. 50–52.
Feast of the Dead Later in 1669, the Iroquois Feast of the Dead was convened at Caughnawaga. The remains of Tekakwitha's parents, along with others, were to be part of the ceremony.Daniel Sargent, Catherine Tekakwitha, Longmans, Green & Co., New York, 1936, p. 167. Also, J.N.B. Hewitt, "The Iroquoian Concept of the Soul," Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. 8, Boston, 1895, p. 109. Father Pierron criticized the Feast of the Dead, but the assembled Iroquois ordered him to be silent. Afterward, however, they relented and promised to give up the feast.Daniel Sargent, Catherine Tekakwitha, Longmans, Green & Co., New York, 1936, pp. 167–168.
Family pressures By the time Tekakwitha turned 17, around 1673, her adoptive mother and aunt tried to arrange her marriage to a young Mohawk man. Tekakwitha fled the cabin and hid in a nearby field and continued to resist marriage.Edward Lecompte, Glory of the Mohawks: The Life of the Venerable Catherine Tekakwitha, translated by Florence Ralston Werum, FRSA, Bruce Publishing Co., Milwaukee, 1944, p. 28; Francis X. Weiser, Kateri Tekakwitha, Kateri Center, Caughnawaga, Canada, 1972, pp. 65–68. Eventually, her aunts gave up their efforts to get her to marry.
In the spring of 1674, at age eighteen, Tekakwitha met the Jesuit priest Jacques de Lamberville, who was visiting the village. In the presence of others, Tekakwitha told him her story and her desire to become a Christian. She started studying the catechism with him.
Conversion and Kahnawake In his journal, Lamberville wrote about Tekakwitha in the years after her death. This text described her before she was baptized as a mild-mannered girl. Lamberville also stated that Tekakwitha did everything she could to practice her Catholic faith in a non-Catholic society, which often caused minor conflicts with her longhouse residents. The journal, however, does not mention violence toward Tekakwitha, while other sources do.
Lamberville baptized Tekakwitha at the age of 19, on Easter Sunday, April 18, 1676. Tekakwitha was renamed "Catherine" after St. Catherine of Siena (Kateri is the Mohawk form of the name).
She remained in Caughnawauga for another six months. Some Mohawks opposed her conversion and accused her of sorcery. Other members of her village stoned, threatened, and harassed her. Tekakwitha fled her home and travelled 200 miles to St. Francis Xavier, a Christian Indian mission in Sault Saint-Louis. Tekakwitha found it was a community full of other Native Americans who had also converted. Tekakwitha joined them in 1677.
Tekakwitha was said to have put thorns on her sleeping mat and lain on them while praying for her relatives' conversion and forgiveness. Piercing the body to draw blood was a traditional ritual practice of the Mohawks and other Iroquois nations. Many of the priests in her community opposed it, as they were concerned about her already poor health.
Tekakwitha reportedly pushed back against these concerns saying, "I will willingly abandon this miserable body to hunger and suffering, provided that my soul may have its ordinary nourishment." Around this time she also began a friendship with another woman named Marie Thérèse Tegaianguenta. The two of them tried to start a Native religious order, but Jesuits rejected that proposal. She lived at Kahnawake the remaining two years of her life.
Father Cholonec wrote that Tekakwitha said:
The Church considers that her 1679 decision on the Feast of the Annunciation completed Tekakwitha's conversion, and the Jesuits described her in early biographies as the "first Iroquois virgin". Although Tekakwitha is rather often regarded as a consecrated virgin, she could, owing to circumstances, never receive the consecration of virgins by a bishop. Nevertheless, the United States Association of Consecrated Virgins later took Kateri Tekakwitha as its patroness.
Mission du Sault St-Louis: Kahnawake The Jesuits had founded Kahnawake for the religious conversion of Native people. When it began, the Natives built their traditional longhouses for residences and gatherings. They also built a longhouse to be used as a chapel by the Jesuits. As a missionary settlement, Kahnawake was at risk of being attacked by members of the Iroquois Confederacy who had not converted to Catholicism. (While it attracted other Iroquois, it was predominantly Mohawk, the prominent tribe in eastern New York.)
After Tekakwitha's arrival, she shared the longhouse of her older sister and her husband. She would have known other people in the longhouse who had migrated from their former village of Gandaouagué (Caughnawaga). Her mother's close friend, Anastasia Tegonhatsiongo, was clan mother of the longhouse. Anastasia and other Mohawk women introduced Tekakwitha to the regular practices of Christianity. This was normal for the women in the village, with many of the missionaries being preoccupied with other religious tasks. Pierre Cholenec reported that "all the Iroquois who come here and then become Christians owe their conversion mainly to the zeal of their relatives".
Kahnawake was a village set up like normal Iroquois villages, moving from location to location after running out of resources. The village was originally not wholly French, but with northward migration towards Canada started by the Five Nations, the village started to gain more Native members. The Five Nations all happened to start migrating north around the same time, without any communication between them. In Kahnawake, there was representation from multiple tribes, and when the French came there were people from different ethnicities. The village was recognized by New France, and given autonomy to deal with problems that would arise. They were also able to form a friendship with New York through this autonomy.
There was fur trade in Kahnawake. The division between the French Church and the Natives was clear-cut in the village; there were few interactions between the two.
Kahnawake was drawn into a war among the different tribes that lasted around two and a half years.
Jesuit Missionaries Chauchetière and Cholenec Jesuit priests Claude Chauchetière and Pierre Cholenec played important roles in Tekakwitha's life. Both were based in New France and Kahnawake. Chauchetière was the first to write a biography of Tekakwitha in 1695, and Cholenec followed in 1696. Cholenec, who had arrived first, introduced traditional items of Catholic mortification, that is, physical deprivation or self-harm, to the converts at Kahnawake. He wanted them to adopt these rather than use Mohawk ritual practices. Both Chauchetière and Tekakwitha arrived in Kahnawake the same year, in 1677.