Kateri Tekakwitha

Iroquois beatified saint

• Born: 1656
• Birthplace: Ossernenon, Mohawk Valley (near present-day Auriesville, New York)
• Died: April 17, 1680
• Place of death: Sault St. Louis, New France (near present-day Montreal, Canada)

Because of her heroic practice of prayer, chastity, mortification, and Christian virtue, Tekakwitha became the first Native American to be beatified by the Roman Catholic Church. Devotion to Kateri Tekakwitha is responsible for establishing Native American ministries in Catholic churches throughout the United States and Canada.

Early Life

Kateri Tekakwitha (KAHT-uh-ree tehk-uh-KWIHTH-uh) was born in Ossernenon in the Mohawk Valley in 1656, near what is today Auriesville, New York. Her Indian name, Tekakwitha, means “putting things in order,” and her Christian surname Kateri (Catherine) was given to her at her baptism at age twenty-one in Fonda, New York. Her mother, Kahenta, was a Christian Algonquian who had been captured by the Iroquois and saved from torture and death by the Mohawk warrior Kenhoronkwa, to whom she also bore a son. Kenhoronkwa was a member of the Tortoise clan of the Iroquois Nation, one of the designated groups listed by the Great Council at the beginning of the Five Nations Confederacy.

When Tekakwitha was four, her parents and brother died in a smallpox epidemic that swept through the Mohawk Valley. The arrival of the Jesuits coincided with the beginning of a series of epidemics that wiped out at least half the population of eastern Canada and adjacent parts of the United States. These epidemics began in the period 1634-1640 and recurred periodically for the next half century. Tekakwitha survived, but the disease left her partially blind, with a pocked face and weakened legs. She was adopted by her aunts and an uncle who had become chief of the Turtle clan and hated the “Black Robes,” as the Jesuit priests were called among the tribes because of their distinctive dress. Despite her disfigured face and reserved and shrinking nature, her aunts began to form marriage plans for her when she was still very young.

After about five years of the sickness, the survivors of the village moved to the north bank of the Mohawk River. Tekakwitha and her relatives moved into the Turtle Clan village called Gandaouaue, today the Caughnawaga/Kahnawahe Reserve near what is now the town of Fonda, New York. In 1667, the Jesuit missionaries Jacques Fremin, Jacques Bruyas, and Jean Pierron, who were part of a peace mission between the Mohawks and the French, spent three days in the lodge of her uncle.

Tekakwitha’s mother had given her early instruction in the faith. However, this was the first time she had an opportunity to receive knowledge of Christianity from the “Black Robes.” For the next eight years, Tekakwitha secretly practiced and remained true to the Christian religion, even though she was not yet baptized and adherence to the new religion caused great risk to her reputation and acceptance by the tribe. She refused to work on Sunday, would not hear of marriage, and refused to fulfill other tribal obligations that interfered with her Christian way of life. When her uncle punished her with beatings, increased her workload, and withheld food from her, she would not succumb. Continual sarcasm, criticism, and mockery were her constant lot.

Life’s Work

In 1674, Jacques de Lamberville took charge of the mission that included the Turtle clan. One year later, Tekakwitha finally managed to meet with the priest when he visited her home and told him about her desire to be baptized. She began to take religious instruction, and on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1676, she was baptized and was given the Mohawk name Kateri, in honor of Saint Catherine of Siena. She was only twenty years of age. Her great fervor after the reception of this sacrament induced her to increase her penances and prayers. This further incited the anger of many of the tribe. Children and drunken men used to chase her and pelt her with stones, calling her “the Christian.” To punish her for abandoning tribal beliefs and customs, her own relatives treated her like a slave, and her uncle even threatened to kill her if she refused to marry.

In July, 1677, Tekakwitha was assisted by Christian Indians to escape her village to go to live at the mission town of Saint Francis Xavier du Sault St. Louis near Montreal, called Caughnawaga by the native people. After a two-month and two-hundred-mile journey through woods, rivers, and swamps, Tekakwitha finally arrived at the mission. Mission towns provided converts with new identities and allegiances by isolating them from their unconverted kinsmen, thus preventing the kind of reversion to traditional belief all missionaries feared.

Tekakwitha lived in the cabin of Anastasia Tegonhatsihonga, another Christian Indian woman, who became her close friend and companion in the practice of Christian virtue. The two women devoted all of their extra time to helping the aged and sick and teaching the children catechism. To go to Mass, Tekakwitha had to arise at four in the morning and walk barefoot even in the snow. Both young women performed extraordinary penances, and the two asked permission to start a religious community. This request was denied, although Tekakwitha was enrolled in the pious association called the Brotherhood of the Holy Family in 1678 because of her extraordinary practices of all the virtues.

Two features stand out in the life of Kateri Tekakwitha: her resolute determination to live a life of virginity as a spouse of Jesus Christ and her persevering spirit of penance and prayer. Even before her baptism when she lived among the Mohawks, Tekakwitha felt drawn to the idea of celibate life, although she had never seen or heard anything concerning the voluntary state of virginity such as the Catholic sisters observed it. The Mohawks knew that the Black Robes lived without marriage but did not know women also practiced this ideal. Even in Caughnawaga, to which she had fled so that she might better practice her faith, the normally obedient Mohawk maiden persisted in her resolve not to marry.

Finally, Tekakwitha approached a Black Robe with her desire to dedicate herself to a life of virginity. Responding to his protests about her material welfare, she insisted with such firmness and clear understanding of the celibate life as practiced in the Catholic Church that he was forced to accede to her request. On the feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, March 25, 1679, Kateri Tekakwitha privately made the vow of perpetual virginity, placing herself in her new state of life under the special protection of the Virgin Mary. She thus became the first recorded Iroquois woman to bind herself by a religious vow to the observance of the evangelical counsels.

After this, Tekakwitha’s desire for prayer and penance for her sins and the wrongdoings of her people was insatiable. Even though she suffered repeated attacks of heavy fever and had to spend most of the time on her cot, when she could walk, she staggered barefoot over the ice of the river while saying the rosary for the conversion of her people. In imitation of how the Iroquois branded the right foot of their slave girls above the ankle as a lasting mark of their servitude, she pressed a burning faggot from the fire to the flesh of her own foot, indicating that she belonged to Christ, body and soul. Despite the advice of her spiritual director, Tekakwitha persisted in performing many acts of penance until she became so weak that she was confined to bed. As she steadily declined, she continued to catechize the children of the village from her sickbed, a cot on the ground.

Kateri Tekakwitha, age twenty-four, died in Holy Week of 1689 on April 17. Immediately after her death, a mysterious event allegedly occurred. According to the accounts of the priests and others present, after her death, her face changed completely within the space of a few minutes. The smallpox marks that had disfigured her countenance from childhood disappeared, and her flesh took on a healthy hue.

The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (1896-1901), one of the most important primary sources for insights into Indian government, law, and religion, notes that a young Indian woman “who lived like nuns” died with the reputation of sanctity and that journeys were being made to her tomb by many Native Americans; it also remarks on miracles and favors reportedly worked through her intercession.

Significance

Kateri Tekakwitha was declared Venerable by the Catholic Church in 1943, and in June, 1980, in the presence of hundreds of North American Indians, she became the first Native American to be beatified. Her feast day in the Calendar of Saints was designated as July 14. In his homily address, Pope John Paul II praised her “solid faith, straightforward humility, calm resignation and radiant joy, even in the midst of terrible sufferings.”

Devotion to Kateri Tekakwitha, who has been named the patron saint of the environment and ecology, is responsible for establishing Native American ministries in Catholic churches across the United States and Canada. Thousands of pilgrims have visited shrines to Kateri erected at both Saint Francis Xavier in Caughnawaga and at her birthplace in Auriesville, New York.

Bibliography

Brown, Evelyn M. Kateri Tekakwitha, Mohawk Maiden. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991. The first five chapters relate events of her life; the remainder closely follow written records and source documents in old French. For high school students and young adults. Illustrated.

Bunson, Margaret R. Kateri Tekakwitha: Mystic of the Wilderness. Preface by Paul A. Lenz. Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, 1992. Emphasis on Native Americans as a link to the vital past of North America. The first chapter gives a detailed description of the customs and culture of Native Americans. Illustrated biography.

Fisher, Lillian M. Kateri Tekakwitha: The Lily of the Mohawks. Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1996. A brief illustrated biography of Tekakwitha.

Greer, Allen. Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. A more recent biography written by a professor of history at the University of Toronto.

Markowitz, Harvey, ed. American Indians. 3 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 1995. A biography of Tekakwitha is included in this three-volume set.

Petrash, Antonia. More than Petticoats: Remarkable New York Women. Guilford, Conn.: TwoDot, 2002. Tekakwitha is one of women profiled in this collection of brief biographies.

SharkeyLemire, PaulaAnne, comp. Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha Prayers and Devotions. New Hope, Ky.: New Hope, 2003. The book contains a brief biography of Tekakwitha and a series of prayers and devotions in her honor.

Walworth, Ellen H. The Life and Times of Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks, 1656-1680. Buffalo, N.Y.: P. Paul and Bro., 1893. Classic biography with information gathered from primary sources and multiple documents. Full account of her life and times. Includes photographs, maps, and appendices with Mohawk vocabularies, maps of trails, and other documents.