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In the seventeenth century, French fishermen, fur traders, and explorers were landing in New France, which included not only Quebec but all the lands watered by the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes.
They traded and made alliances with native Indian tribes such as the Hurons and Algonquins. But for a long time, their small numbers and the vast territories they traveled made it difficult for them to dominate the Indians, as the Spanish in Mexico and South America had done with the more united, sedentary, and agrarian Indians of those regions.
By making treaties with the Hurons, the French automatically incurred the bitter opposition of their enemies, the fierce and warlike Iroquois nation—and especially the Mohawks, a branch of the Iroquois.
Childhood in Captivity. This was the inhospitable world into which Kateri (Catherine) Tekakwitha was born in the year 1656, near upstate Auriesville, New York (now the site of the shrine to the North American Jesuit martyrs). Ten years before, about a mile or so away from her village, the great French Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues had suffered torture and death in the course of the Iroquois’ violent rejection of Christianity. Tekakwitha’s own family reflected these themes of conquest and strife, since her mother Kahenta was a Canadian Algonquin Christian who had been captured in a Mohawk raid and married to a chief. Isolated from her native people and her religion, Tekakwitha’s mother sought solace in her friendship with another Christian captive, Anastasia.
When Tekakwitha was four, a smallpox epidemic swept through her village, killing her father, mother, and baby brother, and leaving her face permanently scarred and her eyes and legs weakened. Whenever she left her birchbark longhouse, she would hold her blanket over her head to shield her eyes from the sun. Her uncle became the new chief, and she was adopted into their childless household. There she grew up eager to work hard to win the love and approval of those around her.
In 1667, when Tekakwitha was eleven, the Mohawks were forced into a grudging peace with the French as a result of a great Iroquois defeat in battle. As part of the peace treaty, Jesuit missionaries were again permitted to visit their villages and explain the Christian teachings to any bold or curious Indians who might want to hear them. For the next eight years, Tekakwitha watched the French Jesuits from a distance. Her uncle hated Christianity and the “Blackrobes” who preached it, and through a combination of fear, obedience, and gratitude, Tekakwitha felt unable to seek out the priests against his will. Nevertheless, she deeply desired to learn more about them and about the Christ her mother had known.
The Natural and the Supernatural. God uses the natural as well as the supernatural to accomplish his purposes. The faith of Tekakwitha’s dead mother must have fueled her daughter’s attraction to Christianity. Perhaps God used her weakness and handicapped eyes to begin the process of weaning her away from the world she had grown up in, for they and her scarred face certainly made her feel different from the other girls in her village. She was aware, however, that the effects of the smallpox would not keep away a prospective husband, because her uncle’s position as chief would make her a desirable mate. Moreover, she knew how very much her childless aunt and uncle wanted her to marry, not least to ensure their own well-being in old age. It was the men who went out to hunt, and their adopted daughter’s husband would not let them go hungry.
This is where the natural and the supernatural aspects of God’s approach to Tekakwitha merge most closely. For the young adolescent—who may have heard something about the Virgin Mary but certainly would not have known about nuns or consecrated virgins—refused to marry anyone in these years before she became a Christian. She who had always been meek and eager to please, quick to spy out any need her aunt and uncle might have, doing whatever her elders told her, firmly refused them this natural desire which was also the universal fate of any Indian girl.
As a result of Tekakwitha’s decision, her aunt and uncle withdrew their approval from her and began treating her like a slave. She suffered, but was not shaken in her resolve to remain a virgin, so unheard of even among Christian Indians. Over time, Tekakwitha’s patience and her family’s realization that they would not change her mind moderated the severity of her treatment, but their lack of understanding and her uncle’s hatred of the Christians remained as a constant barrier between them.
A Turning Point. Meanwhile, some of the Mohawks were responding to the Blackrobes’ message of love and salvation. About two hundred became Christians before Tekakwitha’s baptism, and this drained away strong young lives from the Mohawk settlement, as many of them eventually went north to the Jesuits’ Canadian mission. With each departure, the chief saw his tribe’s strength dwindling not only in numbers but also in its power to oppose the European onslaught in its many forms. His anger and hatred grew with his frustration and sense of impotence.
Finally, after eight years, a new priest, Fr. Jacques de Lamberville, arrived to replace Fr. Boniface, who had died. A day came when an injured foot kept Tekakwitha at home in her lodge while everyone else was out hunting or working in the fields. Fr. de Lamberville came to visit the now nineteen-year-old, and she found the courage to pour out her longing to become a Christian. Amazed, the priest gently asked whether the frail girl understood the sacrifices and persecution she would likely face. Then he advised her to pray and to prepare for her baptism by visiting the chapel whenever she could be spared from her work.
A year of learning and prayer went by, ending with a new birth and a new name on Easter Sunday, 1676. Tekakwitha received the name of Kateri, for St. Catherine, another virgin saint from a far-away country.
Thriving in Exile. Now Kateri, the half-Algonquin adopted daughter of the chief, felt branded and was treated as an alien. Children threw rocks at her. Her family would not feed her on Sunday, because she would not work on the Lord’s day. Her life was threatened. At last, in the fall of 1677, after Kateri had been attacked and almost killed, Fr. de Lamberville arranged for her to be smuggled out with a Christian from another village, who was making the long journey to the St. Francis Xavier mission on the banks of the St. Lawrence, near Montreal. The priest gave her a note to deliver to his fellow Jesuits: “I send you Kateri Tekakwitha. Will you kindly direct her? You will soon discover the treasure I am sending you. Guard it well.”
Pursued by Kateri’s uncle, the small party managed to elude capture. The long journey they took—covering more than two hundred miles—retraced the path of Kateri’s captured mother twenty years earlier. After many days, they reached the mission of St. Francis Xavier safely.
There, Kateri found about one hundred fifty Christian Indian families drawn from a number of tribes—Iroquois, Algonquin, Huron—all living the fullness of the Christian life, attending daily Masses, visiting the Blessed Sacrament, and gathering for evening prayer. Many attended both early morning Mass and the second one, which began at 6:00 a.m., before setting out for the fields to work. “The whole village could be taken for a monastery,” a visiting bishop once wrote, and Kateri thrived spiritually in this atmosphere. She carved crosses on the bark of the trees marking her daily route to the spring for water. She drank in all she could learn of Christianity from Anastasia, once her mother’s friend, and she traveled the route to Christian perfection by leaps and bounds in these last few years of her life.
Seeking Union with Christ. After her First Communion, on Christmas Day 1677, Kateri’s desire to demonstrate her love for God grew even greater. Everything she did was offered to God as prayer. She filled every moment of the day with work, making and embroidering clothes and preparing birch bark for making canoes and furniture. She spent hours every night in prayer, and often absented herself from the common main meal of the day to fast. She once said that she offered her soul to Christ the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, and her body to Christ in the Lord hanging on the Cross.
Kateri also endured a time of suffering imposed by the Indians of the mission, when one woman accused her of drawing her husband into adultery. Over time, her patient virtue and kindness—even to those who accused her—won them over.
When those close to her tried to convince Kateri to marry, she resolutely told them that she belonged only to Jesus. The priests of the mission, recognizing this as a true vocation, allowed her to make her long-held vow of chastity publicly in the church at Mass in 1679. After her consecration, Kateri exchanged her red blanket for a blue one in honor of Mary, and wore the braids of a young unmarried Iroquois girl.
Never strong, Kateri became progressively weaker in body. She suffered from severe headaches, stomachaches, and fever. But her love for God burned so strongly that the Indian women at the mission would try to sit near her in church. They said that looking at her was the best preparation for communion.
Kateri’s strength drained fast throughout her final Lent, in 1680. Near the end, she foretold the day and time of her own death, which occurred at about 3:00 p.m. on April 17, Good Friday. Her last words were “Jesus, Mary, I love you.” She was twenty-four years old. As Kateri’s soul parted from her body, Father Cholenec and the other onlookers watched her face change. The scarring from smallpox and the drawn look of her illnesses gave way to a radiant beauty. At the amazed outcry, the other Frenchmen at the mission hurried to see her body, and were so impressed that they built her coffin leaving the face open to view.
Almost immediately, the few small articles she owned—her food bowl, ragged clothing, crucifix, even the dust from her grave site—became relics to the Indians, and miracles began to be reported. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II on June 22, 1980, three hundred years after her death. Today, the frail little girl with the downcast eyes and the blanket draped protectively over her head has a statue in the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. The feast day of this Native American holy woman shared by Canadians and Americans is celebrated on July 14.