Kateri Tekakwitha

Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 at Ossernenon, a Mohawk village in present-day Auriesville, New York. Her father was a Mohawk chief; her mother was an Algonquin woman who had converted to Christianity. When Kateri was four, a smallpox epidemic swept through the village and killed her parents and infant brother. She survived but was left with permanent facial scarring and severely impaired vision. Her name, Tekakwitha, has been interpreted as "she who gropes her way" — a reference to the vision loss she carried for the rest of her life.

She was taken in by her uncle, also a Mohawk chief, who was suspicious of French missionaries and hostile to the Christian faith her mother had practiced. Kateri grew up in that household, doing domestic work and weaving, attending to the rhythms of Mohawk village life. In 1675, French Jesuit missionaries came to her village and she began speaking with them. She was baptized on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1676, by Father Jacques de Lamberville, and took the name Catherine — Kateri in the Mohawk pronunciation.

Her conversion made her an outcast. She refused to work on Sundays, declined the marriage her uncle arranged for her, and was accused of sorcery by neighbors. Children threw stones at her. Her food was sometimes withheld. In 1677, she fled to the Jesuit mission at Kahnawake, near Montreal, where a community of Native Christian converts had gathered.

At Kahnawake she found her footing. She attended daily Mass, received communion frequently, and spent long hours in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. She cared for the sick and elderly, taught children, and made a private vow of virginity — an act without precedent among Mohawk women of her time. She was known for severe penitential practices and for a joy that persisted despite chronic physical suffering. She died on April 17, 1680, at the age of twenty-four. Witnesses at her deathbed reported that the smallpox scars that had marked her face since childhood vanished completely within minutes of her death.

She was beatified by Pope John Paul II on June 22, 1980, and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on October 21, 2012 — the first Native American to be declared a saint.