Investigation: The many lives of an indigenous saint

In St. François Xavier du Sault, a French Jesuit mission in New France (modern-day Canada) Holy Week, 1680, an already tiny at no more than four-and-a-half-feet tall Mohawk woman died, malnourished, having spent the previous three nights on a bed of thorns (Bonaparte). She was about 23-24 years old. Upon her death, Father Pierre Cholence recounted a miracle that would contribute to her canonization as the first indigenous American Catholic saint. Káteri Tekahkwí:tha, Algonquin on her mother’s side and Mohawk on her father’s, turned white (Palmer 268). Not just spiritually white, figuratively white, pure/sexually innocent white—white white. Cholence writes: “This face, so marked and swarthy, suddenly changed about a quarter of an hour after her death, and became in a moment so beautiful and so white that I observed it immediately (for I was praying beside her) and cried out, so great was my astonishment” (Bonaparte). The miracle that made Káteri Tekahkwí:tha into a saint was that God made her beautiful and then he made her white: “so beautiful and so white” that a Jesuit priest “cried out” in “astonishment” “immediately.” 

Once she was dead, beautiful, and white, Káteri Tekahkwí:tha took on a new life in service of the Jesuit ministry and colonization in New France. “Sacred biography in New France conferred meaning on the colonial enterprise through attention to individual life narratives,” writes Allan Greer (347). At least three people reported seeing her apparition; others attributed miracles to items associated with her such as the dirt around her grave and her crucifix; pilgrimages were made in her name; the area where she died was renamed to Ville Sainte-Catherine; and at least 300 books in 20 languages were written about her (Bonaparte). Three-hundred years later, she was beatified by the Catholic Church and, in 2012, became the first indigenous American saint. 

Catholic retellings of saints’ lives often erase the life, so as to erase the humanity and focus on the spirituality of the saint. In this way, Káteri Tekahkwí:tha is not alone in having her life white-washed, made into a template on which to project Jesuit colonists’ conversion fantasy. At birth, Káteri Tekahkwí:tha’s name had been simply Tekahkwí:tha, to which was added Káteri—Mohawk for Catherine. Historians such as Darren Bonaparte, Allan Greer (p. 344-346), Vera Palmer, and Nancy Shoemaker, however, locate various pieces of Káteri Tekahkwí:tha’s life, and not just her Jesuit-sensationalized “after-life.” By placing their articles into context with other historians’ research into indigenous culture, such as Juliana Barr’s in “A Diplomacy of Gender: Rituals of First Contact in the ‘Land of the Tejas,’” and infusing it with the primary resource, the Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 1610-1791, Káteri Tekahkwí:tha’s life story can be pieced together now—though she did not, in writing, piece it together herself. 

Though we read the wrong article in the Jesuit Relations, in class we concluded that the “Precious and Admirable Death of a Savage Girl 14 Years Old” had so much in common with the Jesuits’ telling of the Káteri Tekahkwí:tha narrative according to Bonaparte and others, that it did not matter; they were two casts of the same mold. While this sounded potentially offensive at first—that one indigenous female’s life story could be interchanged for another—in reality, this is more reflective of the Jesuits’ storytelling methods than of the lives they purport to reflect. Greer writes, after recounting the life stories of the “precious” “savage girl” and Káteri Tekahkwí:tha, among others, that “the Tekakwitha story is by no means an unprecedented departure. Instead, it should be seen as the consummation of a long-term trend in New France hagiography: vignettes of a liminal Other, the ‘exemplary Indian,’ expand, acquire more and more of the signs of saintliness, and shade off into genuinely hagiographic texts with a Christian Indian at the center” (Greer 346). Further, Shoemaker writes that “Undeniably, Tekakwitha was to some extent a Jesuit construction. If you were to strip this narrative of its occasional Iroquois element … it could have taken place in fourteenth-century bourgeois Sinea” (55). In this way, the Jesuits’ relation of Káteri Tekahkwí:tha’s life tells us more about them than about her. 

For the Jesuit authors, “savages” are taken to be interchangeable; yet, it is their storytelling techniques and motifs that are interchangeable. “Precious and Admirable Death of a Savage Girl 14 Years Old” begins with “Perhaps there will be difficulty in believing that Savages can, in so short a time, reach so high a degree of perfection. Yet this is what grace wrought in that innocent heart” (Jesuit Relations 26). Likewise, in “so short a time,” by the time Káteri Tekahkwí:tha was 23-24 years old, she had reached “so high a degree of perfection” as to be considered the “lily among thorns”—the thorns being other indigenous Americans in her vicinity. Káteri Tekahkwí:tha’s mother was Catholic and she was converted by her sister (Bonaparte); the “savage girl” converted her mother; the lives of both were obscured by their deaths then used as tools for conversion of other indigenous Americans by the Jesuits. 

I wrote that the Jesuits fetishized her sexual whiteness/purity through consistently focusing on her “lips,” “heart,” and purity (Plante, “Her mouth”). In much the same way, Káteri Tekahkwí:tha’s body is sexualized and fetishized by the Jesuit priest who narrates the “miracle” that is her death. Again, it is not enough that Káteri Tekahkwí:tha becomes white; she also becomes “beautiful” in the eyes of Father Pierre Cholence the beholder. Her pox-marks erased, she no longer is marred by the colonists’ spread of smallpox that ransacked her village, her family and blurred her vision. While other indigenous American women were hypersexualized—mistaken for prostitutes due to Europeans’ patriarchal culture and its blind spot to the “diplomacy” of women in indigenous culture (Barr 432) —indigenous women such as Káteri Tekahkwí:tha and the “savage girl” had their purity fetishized, even if they were disabled, sick, and young.

Nancy Shoemaker writes that though the “Jesuits preached patriarchy,” they “brought to the Iroquois a toolkit of symbols, stories, and rituals that portrayed women as powerful or that gave women access to power” (53). The “access to power” through her mother’s and sister’s religion, which Káteri Tekahkwí:tha harnessed, according to Palmer and Shoemaker, included avoiding marriage and forging female friendships at St. François Xavier du Sault. Tragically, she harnessed this power against herself in the form of torture so extreme that even the Jesuit confessors asked her to tone it down (Bonaparte), yet not enough to save her life. Though Shoemaker and others show how Káteri Tekahkwí:tha had “access to” Catholic “power,” this power was relative, and it still entailed her sexuality, albeit the renunciation thereof.  

Káteri Tekahkwí:tha’s “youthful escape from the war trauma of her Mohawk Valley home, and her acceptance of selected precepts of Christianity, may be understood on her part as adding rafters to the Longhouse,” Palmer writes, using the Iroquois Confederacy’s “gynocentric” reference of “extending the rafters” to “make room for newly adopted families in the longhouse or lodge” (270). In a similar fashion, the Jesuit colonists’ conversion fantasy used—and uses to this day, really—their version of Káteri Tekahkwí:tha’s death/after-life to “make room for newly adopted” indigenous Americans in Catholicism (Palmer 271). 

Works Cited

Barr, Juliana. “A Diplomacy of Gender: Rituals of First Contact in the ‘Land of the Tejas.’” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 3, 2004, pp. 393-434.

Bonaparte, Darren. “A Lily among Thorns: The Mowak Repatriation of Káteri Tekahkwí:tha.” Presented at the 20th Conference on New York State History. Plattsburgh, New York: June 5, 2009. 

Greer, Allan. “Colonial Saints: Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 2, 2000, pp. 323-348. 

Palmer, Vera. “The Devil in the Details: Controverting an American Indian Conversion Narrative,” Theorizing Native Studies, eds. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, pp. 267-296. Duke UP, 2014.

Plante, Kelly. “Bridging the Gap: Trans-Atlantic Tactics in Jesuits’ Writing of the Life and Death of St. Káteri Tekahkwí:tha.” Human Abstracts, 6 October 2020. 

Plante, Kelly. “’Her mouth was filled with some unknown substance, so delicious, that she would experience that sweetness and pleasure during all the following day’: Sexual/Necro Politics in the Jesuit Relations, 1610-1791.” Human Abstracts, 6 October 2020.

“Precious and Admirable Life of a Savage Girl 14 Years Old,” The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites, pp. 26-42. Madison, WI: The Burrows Company, 1899.

Shoemaker, Nancy. “Kateri Tekakwitha’s Tortuous Path to Sainthood,” Negotiations of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. Routledge, 1995.