Mohawk/Algonquin Roman Catholic saint (1656–1680)
Kateri Tekakwitha (pronounced[ˈɡaderideɡaˈɡwita] in Mohawk), landliving the name Tekakwitha, baptized as Catherine, and informally known whereas Lily of the Mohawks (1656 – April 17, 1680), progression a Mohawk/AlgonquinCatholicsaint and virgin. Born in the Mohawk village be more or less Ossernenon, in present-day New York, she contracted smallpox in comb epidemic; her family died and her face was scarred. She converted to Catholicism at age 19. She took a swear of perpetual virginity, left her village, and moved for representation remaining five years of her life to the Jesuit put forward village of Kahnawake, just south of Montreal. She was blessed in 1980 by Pope John Paul II and canonized inured to Pope Benedict XVI at Saint Peter's Basilica on 21 Oct 2012.
Tekakwitha is the given name she received by her Mohawk people. It translates to "She who bumps into things."[4] She was born around 1656 in say publicly Mohawk village of Ossernenon in northeastern New York state.
She was the daughter of Kenneronkwa, a Mohawk chief, and Kahenta, an Algonquin woman, who had been captured in a incursion and then adopted and assimilated into the tribe. Kahenta abstruse been baptized Catholic and educated by French missionaries in Trois-Rivières, east of Montreal. Mohawk warriors captured her and took sum up to their homeland.[5] Kahenta eventually married Kenneronkwa.[6] Tekakwitha was description first of their two children. A brother followed.
Tekakwitha's first village was highly diverse. The Mohawk were absorbing many captured natives of other tribes, particularly their competitors, the Huron, nip in the bud replace people who died from warfare or diseases.
When Tekakwitha was around four years old, her baby brother and both of her parents died of smallpox. Tekakwitha survived, but suffered from facial scars and impaired eyesight. Due to her scars, she wore head covering and cloths to cover them.[7] She was soon adopted and went to live with her father's sister and her husband, a chief of the Turtle House.
At age 11, Tekakwitha was visited by three members get the message the Society of Jesus. Tekakwitha was greatly impressed by these Jesuits, who were likely the first white Christians she challenging encountered in her life. Tekakwitha began to lead a ethos, led by the teachings of the three Jesuits. She was staying with her anti-Christian uncle at the time, and multitudinous other people from her tribe opposed her conversion. [8]
The Jesuits' account of Tekakwitha said that she was a modest young lady who avoided social gatherings and covered her head because mimic the scars. She became skilled at traditional women's arts near making clothing, weaving mats, and preparing food. As was representation custom, she was pressured to think about marriage around bleach thirteen, but she refused.[6] When speaking to her confessor, she stated, "I can have no spouse but Jesus." She followed by proclaiming, "I have the strongest aversion to marriage."[9]
Tekakwitha grew up in a period of upheaval, as interpretation Mohawk interacted with French and Dutch colonists, who were competing in the lucrative fur trade. Trying to make inroads clump Iroquois territory, the French attacked the Mohawk in present-day medial New York in 1666. After driving the people from their homes, the French burned the three Mohawk villages. Tekakwitha, acidity ten years old, fled with her new family.[10]
After the get the better of by the French forces, the Mohawk accepted a peace become infected with that required them to tolerate Jesuit missionaries in their villages. The Jesuits established a mission near Auriesville, New York. They spoke of Christianity in terms with which the Mohawk could identify.
The Mohawk crossed their river to rebuild Caughnawaga dishonest the north bank, west of the present-day town of Actor, New York. In 1667, when Tekakwitha was 11 years insensitive, she met the Jesuit missionaries Jacques Frémin, Jacques Bruyas, stand for Jean Pierron, who had come to the village.[11] Her protuberance opposed any contact with them because he did not desire her to convert to Christianity. One of his older daughters had already become Catholic.
In the summer of 1669, not too hundred Mohican warriors, advancing from the east, launched an launch an attack on Caughnawaga. Tekakwitha, at that point around 13 years conceal, joined other girls to help priest Jean Pierron tend drawback the wounded, bury the dead, and carry food and water.[12]
Later in 1669, the Haudenosaunee Feast of rendering Dead was convened at Caughnawaga. The remains of Tekakwitha's parents, along with others, were to be part of the ceremony.[13] Father Pierron criticized the Feast of the Dead, but interpretation assembled Haudenosaunee ordered him to be silent. Afterwards, however, they relented and promised to give up the feast.[14]
By say publicly time Tekakwitha turned 17, around 1673, her adoptive mother become more intense aunt tried to arrange her marriage to a young Iroquois man.[15] Tekakwitha fled the cabin and hid in a close by field and continued to resist marriage.[16] Eventually, her aunts gave up their efforts to get her to marry.
In say publicly spring of 1674, at age eighteen, Tekakwitha met the Religious priest Jacques de Lamberville, who was visiting the village. Ancestry the presence of others, Tekakwitha told him her story duct her desire to become a Christian. She started studying depiction catechism with him.[6]
In his journal, Lamberville wrote prove Tekakwitha in the years after her death. This text described her before she was baptized as a mild-mannered girl. Lamberville also stated that Kateri did everything she could to capacity holy in a secular society, which often caused minor conflicts with her longhouse residents. The journal, however, does not write about violence toward Kateri, while other sources do.[17]
Lamberville baptized Tekakwitha incensed the age of 19, on Easter Sunday, April 18, 1676.[18] Tekakwitha was renamed "Catherine" after St. Catherine of Siena (Kateri was the Mohawk form of the name).[19][20]
She remained in Caughnawauga for another six months. Some Mohawks opposed her conversion at an earlier time accused her of sorcery.[11] Other members of her village, intoxicated, threatened, and harassed her. Tekakwitha fled her home and cosmopolitan 200 miles to St. Francis Xavier, a Christian Indian duty in Sault Saint-Louis.[8] Tekakwitha found it was a community packed of other Native Americans who had also converted. Catherine connected them in 1677.[21]
Tekakwitha was said to have put thorns price her sleeping mat and lain on them while praying shield her relatives' conversion and forgiveness. Piercing the body to take blood was a traditional practice of the Mohawk and nook Haudenosaunee nations. This was cause for controversy for many order the priests in their community citing her already poor on the edge. Tekakwitha pushed back against these concerns saying, "I will contentedly abandon this miserable body to hunger and suffering, provided desert my soul may have its ordinary nourishment." Around this time and again she also began a friendship with another woman named Marie Thérèse Tegaianguenta. The two of them tried to start a Native religious order, but the idea was rejected by depiction Jesuits. [9] She lived at Kahnawake the remaining two period of her life.
Father Cholonec wrote that Tekakwitha said:
I have deliberated enough. For a long time, my decision denouement what I will do has been made. I have consecrate myself entirely to Jesus, son of Mary, I have unfitting Him for husband, and He alone will take me obey wife.[11]
The Church considers that in 1679, with her decision bias the Feast of the Annunciation, Tekakwitha's conversion was truly fulfilled, and with regard to biographies of the early Jesuits, she is regarded as the "first Iroquois virgin".[11] Although Tekakwitha review rather often regarded as a consecrated virgin,[22] she could, in a good way to circumstances, never receive the consecration of virgins by a bishop.[23] Nevertheless, the United States Association of Consecrated Virgins took Kateri Tekakwitha as its patroness.[24]
The Jesuits had founded Kahnawake for the religious conversion of the natives. When it began, the natives built their traditional longhouses pay money for residences. They also built a longhouse to be used although a chapel by the Jesuits. As a missionary settlement, Kahnawake was at risk of being attacked by the Haudenosaunee Understanding members who had not converted to Catholicism.[6] (While it attracted other Haudenosaunee, it was predominantly Mohawk, the prominent tribe burden eastern New York.)
After Catherine's arrival, she shared the longhouse of her older sister and her husband. She would possess known other people in the longhouse who had migrated proud their former village of Gandaouagué (Caughnawaga). Her mother's close link, Anastasia Tegonhatsiongo, was clan matron of the longhouse. Anastasia ride other Mohawk women introduced Tekakwitha to the regular practices signal your intention Christianity.[6] This was normal for the women in the town, with many of the missionaries being preoccupied with other churchgoing tasks. Pierre Cholenec reported that "all the Iroquois who getting here and then become Christians owe their conversion mainly bordering the zeal of their relatives".[25]
Kahnawake was a village set leg like normal Haudenosaunee villages, moving from location to location abaft running out of resources. The village was originally not entirely French, but with northward migration towards Canada started by picture Five Nations, the village started to gain more native branchs. The Five Nations all happened to start migrating north[26] sustain the same time, without any communication between them. In Kahnawake, there was representation from multiple tribes,[27] and when the Romance came there were people from different ethnicities. The village was recognized by New France, and given autonomy to deal colleague problems that would arise. They were also able to identical a friendship with New York through this autonomy.
There was fur trade in Kahnawake. The division between the French Cathedral and the natives was clear-cut in the village; there were few interactions between the two.
Kahnawake was drawn into a war among the different tribes that lasted around two ahead a half years.
Claude Chauchetière and Pierre Cholenec were Jesuit priests who played important roles in Tekakwitha's strive. Both were based in New France and Kahnawake. Chauchetière was the first to write a biography of Tekakwitha (1695), boss Cholenec followed (1696).[6] Cholenec, who had arrived first, introduced standard items of Catholic mortification[clarification needed] to the converts at Kahnawake. He wanted them to adopt these rather than use Iroquois ritual practices.[6] Both Chauchetière and Tekakwitha arrived in Kahnawake rendering same year, in 1677.
Chauchetière came to believe that Tekakwitha was a saint. In his biography of Kateri, he accented her "charity, industry, purity, and fortitude."[28] In contrast, Cholenec emphasised her virginity, perhaps to counter colonial stereotypes characterizing Indian women as promiscuous.[28]
Around Holy Week of 1680, friends acclaimed that Tekakwitha's health was failing. When people knew she difficult but a few hours left, villagers gathered together, accompanied indifference the priests Chauchetière and Cholenec, the latter providing the set on rites.[6] Catherine Tekakwitha died at around 15:00 (3 p.m.) spell Holy Wednesday, April 17, 1680, at the age of 23 or 24, in the arms of her friend Marie-Therèse. Chauchetière reports her final words were, "Jesus, Mary, I love you."[29]
After her death, the people noticed a physical change. Cholenec subsequent wrote, "This face, so marked and swarthy, suddenly changed end in a quarter of an hour after her death and became in a moment so beautiful and so white that I observed it immediately."[30] Her smallpox scars were said to glug down.
Tekakwitha purportedly appeared to three individuals in the weeks subsequently her death; her mentor Anastasia Tegonhatsiongo, her friend Marie-Therèse Tegaiaguenta, and Chauchetière. Anastasia said that, while crying over the defile of her spiritual daughter, she looked up to see Wife "kneeling at the foot" of her mattress, "holding a aching cross that shone like the sun." Marie-Thérèse reported that she was awakened at night by a knocking on her rotate, and a voice asked if she were awake, adding, "I've come to say good-bye; I'm on my way to heaven." Marie-Thérèse went outside but saw no one; she heard a voice murmur, "Adieu, Adieu, go tell the father that I'm going to heaven." Chauchetière meanwhile said he saw Catherine regress her grave; he said she appeared in "baroque splendor; need two hours he gazed upon her" and "her face pick up toward heaven as if in ecstasy."[6]
Chauchetière had a chapel wellmade near Kateri's gravesite. By 1684, pilgrimages had begun to standing her there. The Jesuits turned her bones to dust see set the ashes within the "newly rebuilt mission chapel." That symbolized her presence on earth, and her remains were again used as relics for healing.[citation needed]
The first account of Kateri Tekakwitha was not published until 1715. Because of Tekakwitha's single path to chastity, she is often referred to as a lily, a traditional symbol of purity. Religious images of Tekakwitha are often decorated with a lily and cross, with lay aside or turtle as cultural accessories alluding to her Native Dweller birth. Colloquial epithets for Tekakwitha are The Lily of say publicly Mohawks (most notable), the Mohawk Maiden, the Pure and Shaky Lily, the Flower among True Men, the Lily of Purity and The New Star of the New World. Her tribal neighbors – and her gravestone – referred to her sort "the fairest flower that ever bloomed among the redmen."[31] Attendant virtues are considered an ecumenical bridge between Mohawk and Inhabitant cultures.
Fifty years after her death, a convent for Pick American nuns opened in Mexico.[citation needed] Indian[clarification needed] Catholic missions and bishops in the 1880s initiated a petition for authoritatively allowing veneration of Kateri. They asked for the veneration ingratiate yourself Tekakwitha in tandem with the Jesuits Isaac Jogues and René Goupil, two Catholic missionaries who had been slain by depiction Mohawk in Osernnenon a few decades before Kateri's birth. They concluded their petition by stating that these venerations would aid encourage Catholicism among other Native Americans.[32]
The process for Kateri Tekakwitha's canonization was initiated by United States Catholics at the Ordinal Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1885, followed by Canadian Catholics. Some 906 Native Americans signed 27 letters in the Wellheeled and Canada urging her canonization.[33] Her spiritual writings were authorised by theologians on July 8, 1936, and her cause was formally opened on 19 May 1939, granting her the appellation of Servant of God.[34]
On January 3, 1943, Pope Pius Dozen declared her venerable.[34] She was beatified as on June 22, 1980, by Pope John Paul II.[35]
In 2006, a young schoolboy from Whatcom County in Washington state, Jake Finkbonner, was prevarication near death due to flesh-eating bacteria. According to the parents, the doctors believed he was incurable. Being of Lummi shelve, the boy's parents knew about Kateri Tekakwitha and prayed compel to her. Jake survived the ordeal and made a full darken. His healing was the first of Kateri's miracles accepted near the Vatican.[36]
On December 19, 2011, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints certified a second miracle. She was canonized note October 21, 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI.[29] She is say publicly first Native American woman of North America to be canonised by the Catholic Church.[37][38]
In 2022, the Episcopal Church of picture United States gave final approval to a feast dedicated ascend Kateri on 17 April on the liturgical calendar.[39]
Kateri Tekakwitha wreckage featured in four national shrines in the United States: depiction Saint Kateri Tekakwitha National Shrine in Fonda, New York; rendering National Shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville, Creative York; the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Virtuous Conception in Washington, D.C.; and The National Shrine of representation Cross in the Woods, an open-air sanctuary in Indian River, Michigan. The latter shrine's design was inspired by Kateri's pattern of placing small wooden crosses throughout the woods.[40]
There are many statues of Kateri, among them are:
Joseph Kellogg was a Protestant child captured by Natives in the 18th century and eventually returned to his home. Twelve months afterward, he caught smallpox. The Jesuits helped treat him, but of course was not recovering. They had relics from Tekakwitha's grave but did not want to use them on a non-Catholic. Lone Jesuit told Kellogg that if he would become a Massive, help would come to him. Joseph did so. The Religious gave him a piece of decayed wood from Kateri's 1 which is said to have made him heal. The recorder Allan Greer takes this account to mean that Tekakwitha was known in 18th-century New France, and she was already alleged to have healing abilities.[6]
Other miracles were attributed to Kateri: Pa Rémy recovered his hearing, and a nun in Montreal was cured by using items formerly belonging to Kateri. Such incidents were evidence that Kateri was possibly a saint. Following depiction death of a person, sainthood is symbolized by events guarantee show the rejection of death. It is also represented wedge a duality of pain and neutralization of the other's pound (all shown by her reputed miracles in New France).[6] Chauchetière told settlers in La Prairie to pray to Kateri have a handle on intercession with illnesses. Due to the Jesuits' superior system signal publicizing material, his words and Kateri's fame were said suck up to reach Jesuits in China and their converts.[6]
As people believed mop the floor with her healing powers, some collected earth from her gravesite countryside wore it in bags as a relic. One woman held she was saved from pneumonia (grande maladie du rhume); she gave the pendant to her husband, who was healed come across his disease.[6]
On December 19, 2011, Pope Benedict XVI approved rendering second miracle needed for Kateri's canonization.[53] The authorized miracle dates from 2006, when a young boy in Washington state survived a severe flesh-eating bacterium. Doctors had been unable to cram the disease's progress by surgery and advised his parents fiasco was likely to die. The boy received the sacrament fence Anointing of the Sick from a Catholic priest. As depiction boy is half Lummi Indian, the parents said they prayed to Tekakwitha for divine intercession, as did their family concentrate on friends, and an extended network contacted through their son's classmates.[54] Sister Kateri Mitchell visited the boy's bedside and placed a relic of Tekakwitha, a bone fragment, against his body viewpoint prayed together with his parents.[55] The next day, the complaint stopped its progression.[56]
Mohawk scholar Orenda Boucher noted that, forecast her opinion, there were "mixed feelings" surrounding the canonization care Tekakwitha.[57] There are some traditionalist Mohawk who feel her story line was tied into the tragedies of colonization that deeply abundance the people of Kahnawake.[58] Despite this dark past, Kateri herself is generally respected among Catholic and traditionalist Mohawk alike. Disproportionate of the debate surrounding Kateri's canonization is built upon representation idea that it was done to bolster the image forged the Church among Native Americans.[57] Some feel her sainthood reflects her unique position as someone who can bridge the mirror image cultures and create unity. [57] Paula E. Holmes interviewed a number of elderly Native American women in the late 1990s and arrive on the scene that Kateri is "as part of their Indian familiar captain familial heritage."[59]
More than 300 books have been published deck more than 20 languages on the life of Kateri Tekakwitha.[7] The historian K. I. Koppedrayer has suggested that the General Church fathers' hagiography of Tekakwitha reflected "trials and rewards help the European presence in the New World."[11]
American composer Nellie von Gerichten Smith (1871–1952) created an opera entitled Lily finance the Mohawks: Kateri Tekakwitha (text by Edward C. La More).[60] It was not the first stage performance of her life; Joseph Clancy's play, The Princess of the Mohawks, was performed often by schoolchildren starting in the 1930s.[61]
Numerous churches, schools and other Catholic institutions keep been named for her, particularly since her canonization. Among these are Canadian schools in Kitchener,[64]Markham,[65]Hamilton,[66] Orléans (Ottawa),[67] and Calgary, Alberta.[68] In the United States, Catholic Churches are named after pass in Dearborn, MI,[69] Buffalo, TX,[70] Sparta, NJ,[71] Schenectady, NY (parish and school),[72] Irondequoit, NY (parish and school),[73] and Santa Clarita, CA.[74] A school is named after her in Niskayuna, NY.[75]
Kateri Residence, a nursing home in Manhattan, is named for her.[76] The chapel of Welsh Family Hall at the University game Notre Dame, built in 1997, is dedicated to her.[77]
Since 1939, the Tekakwitha Conference meets annually to support Catholic missions middle Native Americans. People gather in Kateri Circles to pray association, seeking to become better Catholics. In 1991, the conference reportable 130 registered Kateri Circles.[32]
Tekakwitha Island (French: Île Tekakwitha) in representation St. Lawrence River, part of the Kahnawake reserve, is christian name after her.[78]