Kateri Tekakwitha Shrine

Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 to a Mohawk chief and a Catholic Algonquin mother, orphaned by smallpox at four, baptized at nineteen, and died at the Saint Francis Xavier Mission in 1680 at age twenty-three. Her canonization in 2012 — the culmination of a process begun in 1939 — made her the first Indigenous North American Catholic saint, a designation celebrated by many and contested by some within her own community.

The story begins in 1656, in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon in present-day New York. A girl is born to Kenneronkwa, a Mohawk chief, and Kahenta, an Algonquin woman who had been baptized Catholic. Around 1660, smallpox tears through the village. Both parents die. Her brother dies. The girl survives, but the disease leaves her face scarred and her eyesight damaged. She is raised by relatives who follow Mohawk traditions.

For the next sixteen years she lives in a world being reshaped by colonial encounter. Jesuit missionaries move among the Mohawk villages. In 1676, at the age of nineteen or twenty, she is baptized by Father Jacques de Lamberville on Easter Sunday, taking the name Catherine — Kateri in the Mohawk rendering, after Saint Catherine of Siena. Her conversion brings hostility from relatives and community members. In 1677, she flees approximately two hundred miles north to the Saint Francis Xavier Mission, a settlement of Mohawk converts on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River.

At the mission, Kateri lives with an intensity of devotion that her Jesuit spiritual directors, Claude Chauchetiere and Pierre Cholenec, describe in terms usually reserved for European mystics. She cares for the sick and elderly. She practices severe asceticism — fasting, sleep deprivation, self-mortification — that some modern scholars interpret as the expression of profound trauma channeled through the only spiritual framework available to her. She takes a vow of perpetual virginity, a choice without precedent in Mohawk society.

On April 17, 1680 — Holy Wednesday — Kateri Tekakwitha dies at the mission. She is twenty-three or twenty-four years old. Multiple witnesses, including Chauchetiere and Cholenec, record that within fifteen minutes of her death, the smallpox scars disappeared from her face, leaving it clear. This reported event became the foundation of her veneration.

The path to sainthood would take centuries. Her cause was opened in 1939. She was declared Venerable in 1943, Beatified in 1980, and canonized on October 21, 2012, by Pope Benedict XVI. Two certified miracles were attributed to her intercession: a healing in the twentieth century and the 2006 recovery of a boy in Washington state from a severe flesh-eating bacterial infection.