St. Kateri Tekakwitha

Their story

Tekakwitha was born in 1656 in a Mohawk village in what is now upstate New York. Her father was a Mohawk chief and her mother an Algonquin Christian. When she was four, smallpox swept through the village and killed her parents and her little brother. Tekakwitha survived, but the disease left her face scarred and her eyesight weak. She was raised by her uncle and grew into a quiet, hardworking young woman. When Jesuit missionaries visited her village, Tekakwitha listened eagerly to their teaching about Jesus. On Easter Sunday in 1676, at the age of twenty, she was baptized and given the name Kateri, after St. Catherine of Siena. Her family and neighbors did not understand her new faith. She was mocked, threatened and pressured to marry. The next year she secretly escaped and walked about two hundred miles to a Christian Mohawk community near Montreal. There Kateri received her First Communion on Christmas Day, 1677. She spent long hours in prayer, often in the woods before a cross she had carved in a tree, and cared for the sick and the elderly. She made a vow to give her life entirely to Christ. Kateri died on April 17, 1680, at the age of 24. Her last words were "Jesus, I love you." Witnesses said that after her death her scars disappeared and her face became radiant. Known as the Lily of the Mohawks, she was canonized in 2012, the first Native American saint.