She
was adopted by her two aunts and an uncle. Kateri
became converted as a teenager. She was baptized
at the age of twenty and incurred the great
hostility of her tribe. Although she had to suffer
greatly for her Faith, she remained firm in it.
Kateri went to the new Christian colony of Indians
in Canada. Here she lived a life dedicated to
prayer, penitential practices, and care for the
sick and aged. Every morning, even in bitterest
winter, she stood before the chapel door until it
opened at four and remained there until after the
last Mass. She was devoted to the Eucharist and to
Jesus Crucified. She died on April 17, 1680 at the
age of twenty-four. She is known as the "Lily
of the Mohawks". Devotion to Kateri is
responsible for establishing Native American
ministries in Catholic Churches all over the
United States and Canada. Kateri was declared
venerable by the Catholic Church in 1943 and she
was Beatified in 1980. Work is currently underway
to have her Canonized by the Church. Hundreds of
thousands have visited shrines to Kateri erected
at both St. Francis Xavier and Caughnawaga and at
her birth place at Auriesville, New York.
Pilgrimages at these sites continue today.
St. Kateri Teckakwitha is the first Native American to
be declared a Saint. Her feastday is July 14. She
is the patroness of the environment and ecology as
is St. Francis of Assisi.
Kateri Tekakwitha (the name "Kateri" is
derived from the French Catherine, her baptismal
name) was born around 1656 in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon
near present-day Auriesville, New York. She was the
daughter of a Mohawk chief, and Tagaskouita, a
Roman Catholic Algonquin who had been adopted into the
tribe after capture. Her mother Tagaskouita had been
baptized and educated by French missionaries in
Trois-Rivières, east of Montreal. Mohawk warriors
captured her and took her to their homeland. Tagaskouita
eventually married Kenneronkwa.
Kateri's village was highly diverse, as the Mohawk
were absorbing many captured natives of other tribes,
particularly their competitors the Huron, to replace
people who died from European diseases or warfare. She
was most likely born into the Turtle Clan. (The Mohawk
and other Iroquois have a matrilineal kinship system, in
which children are born into the mother's clan and take
their status from her.) When she was young, her village
moved to a different location. The Mohawk suffered from a
smallpox epidemic from 1661 to 1663. Kateri's brother and
both her parents died, and she was left with scars and
impaired eyesight.
She was adopted by her maternal uncle, a chief of the
Turtle Clan.
The Jesuits’ account of Kateri said that she was a
modest girl who avoided social gatherings; she covered
much of her head with a blanket because of the smallpox
scars. They told that, as an orphan, she was under the
care of uninterested relatives. According to Mohawk
practices, she was probably well taken care of by her
clan, her mother and uncle's extended family, with whom
she lived in the longhouse. She became skilled at
traditional women’s arts, which included making
clothing and belts from animal skins; weaving mats,
baskets and boxes from reeds and grasses; and preparing
food from game, crops and gathered produce. She took part
in the women's seasonal planting and intermittent
weeding. She was pressured to consider marriage around
age thirteen, but reportedly she refused.
Kateri grew up in a period of constant change as the
Mohawk interacted with French and Dutch colonists. In the
fur trade, the Mohawk originally traded with the Dutch,
who had settled in Albany and Schenectady. The French
traded with and were allied with the Huron. Trying to
make inroads in Iroquois territory, the French attacked
the Mohawk in present-day central New York in 1666,
destroying several villages and their winter stores.
After the defeat by the French forces, the Mohawk were
forced into a peace treaty that required them to accept
Jesuit missionaries in their villages. While there, the
Jesuits studied Mohawk and other native languages in
order to reach the people. They spoke of Christianity in
terms with which the Mohawk could identify. In his work
on Tekakwitha, Darren Bonaparte notes the parallels
between some elements of Mohawk and Christian belief. For
instance, the Jesuits used the word Karonhià:ke,
the Mohawk name for Sky World, as the word for heaven in
the Lord’s Prayer in Mohawk. "This was not just a
linguistic shortcut, but a conceptual bridge from one
cosmology to another."
The Mohawk rebuilt on the north side of the Mohawk
River at what they called Caughnawaga, west of the
present-day town of Fonda, New York. In 1667, when Kateri
was 11 years old, she met the Jesuits Jacques Fremin,
Jacques Bruyas, and Jean Pierron, who had come to the
village. Her uncle was against any contact with them
because he did not want her to convert to Christianity.
One of his older daughters had already left Caughnawaga
to go to Kahnawake, the Catholic mission village near
Montreal.
In the spring of 1675 at age eighteen, Kateri met the
Jesuit Father Jacques de Lamberville and started studying
the catechism with him.
