Kateri Tekakwitha

Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, on the south bank of the Mohawk River in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) territory, in what is now upstate New York. Her father was a Mohawk chief; her mother was an Algonquin woman who had been captured in a raid, adopted into the Mohawk community, and who had been baptized as a Catholic while living among the French. When Tekakwitha was about four years old, a smallpox epidemic struck Ossernenon, killing her parents and her younger brother and leaving her with facial scars and permanently weakened eyesight. She was raised thereafter by her uncle, a prominent Mohawk leader who opposed the Christian missions. The name Tekakwitha is commonly explained with reference to her poor vision, often rendered as she who bumps into things.

In the mid-1660s, during a period of war between the French and the Iroquois, French forces destroyed Ossernenon and neighboring Mohawk towns. The survivors established a new village called Caughnawaga near present-day Fonda, New York. Jesuit missionaries, including Father Jacques de Lamberville, were permitted to work there. Through the Jesuits and through Christian captives, Tekakwitha encountered Catholic teaching. Relatives sought to arrange a marriage for her according to Mohawk custom, but she refused. On Easter Sunday in 1676 she was baptized by de Lamberville and given the name Kateri, a form of Catherine, in honor of Saint Catherine of Siena. After baptism she kept Sunday as a day of rest and withdrew from some traditional practices, which exposed her to hostility and mockery in the village.

In 1677, with the aid of missionaries and Christian relatives, she left the Mohawk valley and traveled to the Jesuit mission of Saint-François-Xavier at Sault Saint-Louis, known as Kahnawake, on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River opposite Montreal in New France. There she lived among Native Christian converts, attending daily Mass, praying at a cross in the woods, caring for the sick and elderly, and teaching children. She practiced severe bodily mortifications. On 25 March 1679, the feast of the Annunciation, she made a private vow of perpetual virginity. She hoped to gather Native women into a religious community, but the Jesuit superiors considered her too young and too frail to undertake such a foundation. She remained a laywoman and was never a member of a religious order.

Kateri's health, already damaged by smallpox and by her austerities, declined sharply in 1680. She died at Kahnawake on 17 April 1680, aged about twenty-four. Jesuit witnesses, notably Fathers Claude Chauchetière and Pierre Cholenec, reported that the smallpox scars on her face faded within a short time after her death, a change that those present regarded as a sign of holiness. A local cult developed at the mission, and Jesuit biographies of her life circulated in France. In the twentieth century the Holy See advanced her cause: she was declared Venerable by Pope Pius XII in 1943, beatified by Pope John Paul II on 22 June 1980, and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on 21 October 2012. She is the first member of a Native American people of the present-day United States and Canada to be canonized by the Catholic Church and is widely known as the Lily of the Mohawks.