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Saint Kateri Tekakwitha holding a cross, with a river and church behind her, painted by Joseph Légaré about 1843

Saint Kateri Tekakwitha

Mohawk woman who walked 200 miles to live for Christ, the first Native American saint

Patron of
Indigenous Americans
Western calendar
17 April, 14 July in the United States
Orthodox calendar
Not kept

Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, where Isaac Jogues had been killed ten years before, to an Algonquin Christian mother and a Mohawk chief, and smallpox took her parents and her brother and left her face scarred and her eyes weak. At eighteen she asked a missionary for baptism and was named Kateri, Catherine, and when her village turned against her she walked some 200 miles to the Christian village near Montreal. There she gave herself to Christ alone, saying "I have chosen Him for husband", and died in Holy Week of 1680; in 2012 the Lily of the Mohawks became the first Native American to be declared a saint.

Sources

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