Kateri Tekakwitha

Kateri Tekakwitha was born about 1656 in a Mohawk village in what is now upstate New York. Ellen Walworth’s 1891 life, drawing on the accounts of the Jesuit missionaries who knew her, gives her parentage:

Her father was a Mohawk warrior, and her mother a Christian Algonquin captive, who had been brought up and baptized among the French settlers at Three Rivers in Canada.Ellen Hardin Walworth, The Life and Times of Kateri Tekakwitha (1891)

When she was about four, smallpox swept the Mohawk nation. It scarred her face and weakened her eyes, and it left her an orphan:

Tekakwitha’s brother shared the fate of her parents. All three died within the space of a few days. Overshadowed by death and disease when she was only four years old, the little Indian child alone remained of the family.Walworth, The Life and Times of Kateri Tekakwitha (1891)

She was instructed by the Jesuit Father Jacques de Lamberville and baptized at Easter 1676, taking the Christian name Catherine — Kateri in the Mohawk tongue. Walworth records the words of the sacrament:

Katherine, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.the baptismal formula, in Walworth, The Life and Times of Kateri Tekakwitha (1891)

As a Christian among her own people she met hostility, and about a year later she made the long journey north to the Christian mission of Sault St. Louis (Kahnawake), near Montreal. There, on 25 March 1679, she was allowed “to consecrate herself to God by a vow of perpetual virginity.” Her health, never strong after the smallpox, gave way under her austerities, and she died at the mission on 17 April 1680. Walworth gives her farewell to her companion Thérèse:

I am going to die. Remember always what we have done together since we knew one another… Never give up mortification. I will love you in heaven,—I will pray for you,—I will help you—Kateri Tekakwitha, reported by Father Chauchetière, in Walworth (1891)

Thus died Kateri Tekakwitha, on Wednesday, April 17, 1680. She was twenty-four years of age.Walworth, The Life and Times of Kateri Tekakwitha (1891)

Father Cholenec, who had been at prayer beside her, recorded what he said he saw about a quarter of an hour after her death — the smallpox-scarred face he had known for years:

But this face… thus emaciated and marked, changed all at once, about a quarter of an hour after her death; and it became in an instant so beautiful and so fair that… I gave a great cry, so much was I seized with astonishment.Father Pierre Cholenec, eyewitness, in Walworth (1891)

Kateri Tekakwitha was beatified in 1980 and canonized in 2012 — the first Native American saint.