Kateri Tekakwitha

Kateri Tekakwitha (1656–1680), known as the 'Lily of the Mohawks' and 'Protectress of Canada,' was a Mohawk-Algonquin Catholic laywoman who became the first Native American to be canonized. Her short life of faith and suffering unfolded in seventeenth-century colonial North America at the collision point of indigenous Mohawk culture and French missionary Christianity. She was born in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon (near present-day Auriesville, New York) — the same site where Jesuit missionaries Isaac Jogues and Jean de Lalande had been martyred a decade earlier. Her father was a Mohawk chief; her mother, an Algonquin woman who had been baptized and educated by French missionaries. A smallpox epidemic when Kateri was four killed both parents and her brother, leaving her with severely impaired vision and a deeply scarred face. Raised by her uncle, a chief fiercely opposed to Christianity, Kateri was drawn to Jesuit missionaries who visited the village. She was baptized in 1676 at age nineteen, taking the name Catherine — Kateri in Mohawk. The conversion provoked immediate hostility: she was mocked, threatened, denied food on Sundays, and reportedly threatened with death. In 1677 she fled on a 200-mile journey to the Christian Mohawk mission of Kahnawake, just south of Montreal. At Kahnawake, Kateri gave herself to an intense life of prayer, penance, and service to the sick and elderly. She took a private vow of perpetual virginity — a striking choice in a culture where marriage was the norm — and her austerities grew severe enough to worry her spiritual directors. She died on April 17, 1680, at age twenty-four. Witnesses reported that her facial scars vanished within minutes of her death, an account that has been central to her veneration ever since. Kateri was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1980 and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on October 21, 2012, at Saint Peter's Basilica — alongside six others including Marianne of Molokaʻi and Pedro Calungsod. She is venerated as patron of ecology, indigenous peoples, and those mocked for their faith.