[On July 7, 1946, Frances Xavier “Mother” Cabrini became (posthumously) the first American to be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church. So this week for the 80th anniversary of that occasion I’ll AmericanStudy Cabrini and four other American saints, leading up to a weekend post on Catholics in 2026 America!]
On two tragic contexts for the first Native American saint, and another layer to her legacy.
Tekakwitha (1656-1680) was born in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon (in upstate New York) to Mohawk Chief Kenneronkwa and his wife Kahenta, an Algonquin captive who had been adopted into the tribe. When she was just four years old, both of her parents and her younger brother died in a smallpox epidemic, leaving the orphaned Tekakwitha with extensive facial scars that she covered with cloths for the rest of her life. She would be adopted and raised by her father’s sister, but would remain a quiet and withdrawn girl, no doubt permanently traumatized by the experience. Every American schoolkid learns of the epidemics that swept through indigenous communities after contact with Europeans, but I believe we tend to keep those histories on the overarching level of statistics, which can be so large and overwhelming as to make it difficult to humanize their true effects. This young child’s forever-altered life and identity can help us ground the numbers in their tragic realities.
Tekakwitha would encounter her first Jesuit missionaries in 1667, when she was 11 years old, and the far from coincidental timing of that meeting reflects another type of historic tragedy. A year earlier, in 1666, French forces attacked the Mohawks, part of an ongoing campaign to ally with the Iroquois (for their fur trade among other factors); the French burned three Mohawk villages, including Caughnawaga where Tekakwitha lived with her adopted family. The peace treaty through which this brief but bloody conflict was resolved required the Mohawk to allow Jesuit missionaries to visit their villages, and it was when three such missionaries–Jacques Frémin, Jacques Bruyas, and Jean Pierron—arrived at Tekakwitha’s rebuilt village of Caughnawaga that she had her first conversations with these Christian emissaries and began the process that culminated in her 1676 baptism and renaming as Kateri (Mohawk for Catherine, after St. Catherine of Siena). I don’t mean to imply that these Jesuits were parallel to the murderous French forces who had previously burned the village, but there’s also no way to separate one form of European contact from the other.
Tekakwitha died just four years later, on April 17th, 1680, at the tragically young age of 24, from unclear physical ailments (possibly related to those lingering smallpox effects). The process of her canonization would proceed very gradually from that point, including the first written accounts of her life that began to spread her story in the early 1700s, the first petitions for her canonization (signed by hundreds of Native American Catholics) in the late 19th century, and a series of 20th and then early 21st century steps that culminated in her 2012 canonization by Pope Benedict XVI. I don’t believe any part of that multi-century process changes the tragic realities that she, her family, and her tribe experienced, and I think any attempt to remember and share her story has to lean into those histories first and foremost (as I hope I have in this post). But I would simply add this: Catholicism has been and remains a fraught, complex, and absolutely crucial part of Native American identity, community, and life, and so it’s unquestionably important to have a Native American saint to commemorate.
Next saint tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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