8

ENCOUNTERS WITH KATERI TEKAKWITHA

The home territory of my tribe, the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, is in Shawnee, Oklahoma. I describe myself as being “without reservation” because I have never personally visited Shawnee or our own tribal community. What I know about our Citizen Potawatomi Nation Reservation is based on stories and photos in our tribal newspaper, Hownikan, and from family members who have visited there. Prior to the events described below, my only direct acquaintance with other reservations and reserves was based on briefly driving through them. Otherwise my knowledge of them was entirely secondhand, derived from books, articles, and stories of friends.

It therefore came as a great surprise when I encountered Kahnawake (Kahnawá:ke), a major Mohawk reserve. Connecting directly and repeatedly with this community brought me into contact with one of its more famous residents, Kateri Tekakwitha. This development left me reeling day and night for months as I attempted to make sense of increasingly mystifying and intriguing visitations, observations, and reflections associated with a young Mohawk woman who died more than three hundred years ago. How and why she was able, repeatedly, to pull me through the looking glass and have me participate in her past so that I might better understand the present is a tale that sheds light, not only on my awakening, but on the spiritual challenges that indigenous people have faced ever since their first encounters with European settler-colonial culture.

image September 2018 image

First Encounters

In 2012 Kateri Tekakwitha became the first Native North American to be recognized as a saint by the Catholic Church. Although she had died in 1680, the mystery of her life, and perhaps some manifestations of her spirit, have been present in our house on an intermittent basis. On several occasions I have almost felt as if she has checked in as a guest to better raise her gentle voice continually, day and night, in our residence. Such a claim may sound arrogant and self-aggrandizing. As someone who is not Catholic, I cannot claim a long-standing and intuitive understanding of individual relationships with saints. So let me explain how these perplexing developments came about.

My Kateri connection came about when Ed Shoener, a friend who is a deacon in the Catholic Church, visited, and we spent a considerable amount of time discussing my awakening to our family’s Native American heritage. Ed mentioned that we might be interested in St. Kateri Tekakwitha, inasmuch as she is viewed as the patron saint of the environment. Ed and I have a decades-long relationship working together on environmental matters locally and globally. Ed had visited a shrine of Kateri and recommended it. He probably mentioned that the shrine was in upper New York State, but if he did, that fact didn’t really register.

A few weeks after Ed’s visit, Carolyn and I found ourselves in front of the Shrine of St. Kateri Tekakwitha at the St. Francis Xavier Mission on the Kahnawake Reserve near Montréal. We had not gone to Kahnawake looking for the shrine. We were driving through the reserve looking for Moccasin-Jo coffee. Normally we just drive over and through Kahnawake on a four-lane highway and bridge, on our way to and from Lachine, where we live part-time, just across the St. Lawrence River.

While looking for a store that might sell the coffee, we saw signs for a visitors’ center, stopped, and parked. It was closed. Then we noticed the Kateri shrine next door. The shrine was also closed on the weekend, so we did not enter. We walked around the ancient stone buildings, gleaning what facts we could from signs and markers. I left wanting to know more about Kateri and began wondering how to put fragments of her story together. Ed’s mention of her shrine began to churn in my memory, and it raised questions about where her real shrine was. Did I misremember what Ed had said about its location?

Upon returning home and doing a quick online search, I discovered that there are two major shrines in North America dedicated to St. Kateri. One was the Kahnawake site in Québec Province, which we had just stumbled across. The other is in New York State, near Schenectady, which was apparently the shrine our friend had visited. Who had the real saint in residence? I began to wonder.

To add further complications, being a Native American, I am also sensitive to the controversies surrounding the Christianization of indigenous peoples. Countless questions began to spin in my head. Who exactly was Kateri Tekakwitha? How and why did she become a Christian, and eventually a Catholic saint? Why would Mohawk people living today in Kahnawake embrace a Christian saint, even as the community struggles to protect its own indigenous culture and reverse many of the more extreme effects of colonialism and assimilation? How was Kateri viewed and treated in her own time? I attempted to respond to these questions as a historian while other rumblings began to reverberate in the back of my mind.

While the detour to find coffee had been unsuccessful, another, more intriguing detour was presenting itself, this one far longer and farther afield. As I looked down that path, unassembled fragments of a historical biography beckoned. It aroused my curiosity, like a half overgrown hiking trail leading into a unknown meadow, which invites and tantalizes with mystery and by encouraging further exploration with an array of wildflowers never seen before and with unidentifiable scents. In such circumstances, who doesn’t want to know what lies just beyond the immediately visible? I journeyed in, and this is what I found.

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An Enigma Wrapped in Competing Narratives

Kateri was born in 1656 in the Mohawk River Valley of what is now New York State. The village of her birth was Ossernenon, near present-day Auriesville. Kateri’s birth name was Ioragode; in English that would be Sunshine.

Kateri’s father, Kenneronkwa, was a Mohawk chief. Her mother, Tagaskouita, was an Algonquin brought up by French settlers near Trois Riviѐres, Québec, where she had converted to Christianity. Tagaskouita, captured by a Mohawk raiding party in 1653, was taken south to Ossernenon, where she married.

In 1660, Kateri’s parents and brother died in a smallpox epidemic. Kateri barely survived the illness; her face was scarred and her eyes so damaged that she was nearly blind. Four-year-old Kateri was then placed under the care of her uncle, also a chief, and lived in his longhouse. At this time her birth name, Ioragode, was replaced with a new name, Tekakwitha, which means “she who pushes or feels her way with her hands” or “she who bumps into things.” Presumably the name arose from her habit of feeling her way in the village or forest with outstretched arms.

In some sources, the name Tekakwitha is translated as “puts things in order.” This translation appears in histories of Kateri’s life created by her hagiographers, who argue that “she put her life in order in a short time.”1 Such translation might be seen as an attempt to make Kateri appear to be a seer rather than as a person with limited eyesight who stumbled in the forest. But before this highly positive translation is dismissed as a yet another gratuitous misreading of indigenous peoples’ names, we need to reflect on our inability to grasp Native American names as something more than exotic. For example, they often involve animal associations, such as “Sitting Bull” or “Black Elk,” with connotations non-Natives simply cannot access. Other names use adjectives that on a modern school playground might become sources of taunting and teasing, like “Crazy Horse.” Native peoples were more accepting of a wide range of behavior than our contemporary society. Deviations from the norm were seen as normal in the natural world, as well as in the human world, where those with ambiguous gender or behavioral abnormalities were often viewed as spiritually gifted. Such tolerance was a part of life in Kateri’s village, which consisted of a blended culture of people from many tribes. Her life and spiritual journey can only be understood in this multicultural context and through the freedom of spiritual choice, as well as the confusion, that it likely presented.

As I kept wandering further down the path of Kateri’s biography, I became ever more willing to risk getting deeper into the weeds. After all, my elders and kin in the forest have taught me that weeds are often just wildflowers that we have not taken time to understand and appreciate. Many are wild edibles and medicinal plants hidden in plain sight. Is not Kateri’s blindness a metaphor for our own?

Some accounts claim that Kateri eventually regained some or much of her sight, and if stories of her skilled beadwork and other craft talents are true, the recovery must have been considerable. Nevertheless, facial scarring remained, and according to some accounts she covered her head with a blanket to protect her eyes from the sun. She may also have been covering her disfigured face.

In October 1667, the Marquis Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy and several hundred French soldiers attacked the Iroquois Confederation settlements in the Hudson River basin, including Kateri’s Mohawk village. This was part of a campaign to eradicate the Iroquois, who were trading furs with the English and who were in conflicts with French settlers.

The Mohawk villagers fled before the attacking French army, which burned their longhouses and destroyed the squash and corn the women had grown and were about to harvest. Facing winter, they were without food. The triumphant French erected a cross on the site of the former villages and celebrated by holding a Catholic Mass.

As was typical of the times, conversion to Christianity occurred in the context of military campaigns. The colonizers saw conversion as a redeeming feature of their conquests, as a noble achievement, beyond political and economic gain. Conversion was also part of a clearly articulated and well-documented agenda to undermine indigenous belief systems and weaken native authority. James Axtell’s The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures within Colonial North America details the strategies used by religious orders and colonists to undermine indigenous religions and lifestyles.

As part of what was described as a peace settlement, the French established a Jesuit outpost in the Hudson Valley to continue missionary work. Some of the Mohawk then relocated to a new site a short distance away from Ossernenon and established the village of Caughnawaga, which means “place of the rapids in the river.” Jesuit priests, known to Indians as “Black Robes” because of their long, black clerical clothing, took up residence nearby and learned the Mohawk language. They attempted to gain acceptance and convert indigenous people, initially at least, by seeking to find common ground between the two worldviews. This added yet another cultural dimension to the already blended culture of Kateri’s world where indigenous cultures had long intermixed.

The growing Christian influence in Caughnawaga created tensions in Kateri’s extended family. In 1667, at the age of eleven, she met three Jesuit missionaries. Attempting to understand such encounters challenges a multitude of strongly held opinions on matters of settlercolonial culture. Some in the Native American community today view the missionary priests as colonizing destroyers of Native beliefs, and present Kateri as the poster child of such victimization. But Kateri’s mother had become a Christian while most likely also holding on to many traditional beliefs. So the Black Robes were not the young child’s first encounter with a new belief system, and their efforts at engagement may have had some resonance.

Kateri’s adopted family was torn by the Black Robes’ successful conversions of Mohawks to Christianity. Her cousin adopted the new faith and left Caughnawaga to go to the Jesuit-operated St. Francis Xavier Mission at Sault St. Louis, near Montréal in New France, later to be known by its Mohawk name, Kahnawake. During these developments, Kateri’s uncle reportedly attempted to prohibit her contact with the missionaries. But his and other efforts to push back against the Jesuits proved to be a losing struggle.

As Jesuit missionary and French secular influence grew, priests became boundary definers, shifting from cultural bridge building to making increasingly clear distinctions between the two colliding cultures on spiritual matters. During Kateri’s formative years, the Jesuits started directly challenging specific Mohawk cultural practices and religious ceremonies.

A critical confrontation happened in 1669 when Garakontié, a chief from a neighboring Onondaga tribe, appeared at Caughnawaga to join in preparations for a Feast of the Dead. This Iroquois ceremony occurred approximately every ten years, or when a tribe relocated and wanted to take remains of the dead with them. Part of the ceremony involved exhumation of buried human remains. Native Americans were respectful and even a bit fearful of their dead, as they believed that spirits lingered in both the flesh and bones. Only when the spirit was freed of a fleshly connection could it finally walk on. Consequently, removing the flesh of exhumed remains was an important part of the Feast of the Dead. Cleaned bones were wrapped in animal skins and transported to a new collective burial site.

Father Pierron, a Jesuit priest in Kateri’s village, interrupted the Feast of the Dead ceremony and denounced it as superstitious, demanding that it be stopped if the Mohawk wanted to have harmonious relations with the French. With this threat, he was deftly combining his spiritual influence, his association with French traders, who brought wealth, and the memory of French soldiers, who had recently and could again bring coercive power to bear. The Feast of the Dead was stopped dead in its tracks.

Whatever Pierron said or did must have been compelling. Later in the same year, 1669, Garakontié traveled to Québec, where in the midst of great fanfare he denounced his “superstitious” beliefs, promised to discontinue the traditional practice of polygamy, and was given a Christian name, Daniel, at his baptism. Garakontié’s was just one of many high-profile conversions to have occurred in Kateri’s life; two years later a respected Mohawk warrior and chief, Ganeagowa, returned from a trip north to the Jesuit settlement of Kahnawake and announced his conversion to Christianity.

A Window on the Human Condition

At this point in the narrative of Kateri Tekakwitha’s life, important and universal questions about spirituality arose and gave me pause. They were the incentive for me to create my medicine-wheel chart of the ways of knowing and vetting spiritual encounters, discussed in chapter 4. That chart originated with the following questions, which were prompted by digging into the history of this one woman.

Not surprisingly, the very same types of questions are now being raised with respect to the Lakota medicine man Black Elk, currently being considered for sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church.

Even the early Jesuit missionaries asked such questions. More than one despaired at the daunting task of communicating Christian teachings across linguistic and cultural barriers. For example, one Father Lejeune lamented that “our truths are newer to these Barbarians than the operations of Algebra would be to a person who could only count to ten.”2 Other Jesuits, perhaps doubting their ability to compete with indigenous spiritual leaders, used European medicine to display their shamanlike power. Others used their ability to predict eclipses in order to give an impression of power greater than that of holy leaders within the tribe.

Jesuit translators of the Scriptures frequently departed significantly from their literal meaning in order to make foreign notions familiar to indigenous people. Consequently, some of the historical analysis of this period, particularly by some secular sources and indigenous scholars, echoes the questions stated above. Did the Jesuits stray too far and materially misrepresent the new faith? Did many Indians convert for mere convenience, in order to gain social acceptance among increasingly powerful conquerors? Or did they engage in cultural accommodation outwardly, for economic gain, as did no small number of voyageurs and fur traders, including my own French ancestor who adopted Indian ways? The issue of forced religious conversions has been thrashed out for centuries. Think of Moors in Spain who became Christians after the expulsion of Muslims by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.

There is indeed some evidence to support all of the above hypotheses. But ultimately each epoch must be examined on its own terms. As many historians argue, if we really want to understand history, we must deal with it as multiple individual biographies and not just with the broad brushstrokes of collective portraiture. The need for such finegrained historical evidence was a motive behind my decision to describe one person’s early twenty-first-century spiritual journey—my own.

Given the lack of documents in Native Americans’ voices about their own conversions to Christianity, we should hesitate to give definitive answers for entire populations or deliver sweeping verdicts on the authenticity of their religious experiences. However, if Kateri Tekakwitha’s life is any indication, colonial religious conversion was at least sometimes profound and genuine, and it often brought unimaginable solace.

A Counternarrative

The opportunities and attractions offered by permeable cultural frontiers in seventeenth-century North America are most astoundingly documented, not in Indian conversions to Christianity, but in English settler assimilations to French Catholic communities and Native American tribes. English colonists were often abducted by Indians raiding New England settlements. Many hundreds were taken captive. Some captives were killed. However, many of the survivors adapted to their new lives and apparently found comforting new identities and lives among the “savages.”

English Protestant settler families were often shocked and dismayed when they had opportunities to ransom and reunite lost family members, only to discover that they typically sought to remain in their adopted Indian communities. For example, in 1704, more than 100 captives were taken from Deerfield, Massachusetts, north to New France. The colony’s minister was ransomed, but his daughter was kept by the Mohawks, married into the tribe, had children, and chose to stay with her new family instead of returning to her New England roots. Settler abductions in the later eighteenth century follow a different pattern, with more abductees seeking escape and return to settler culture. But again, our understanding of events needs to be fine-grained and context-specific. Seventeenth-century indigenous culture was still largely intact and coherent. Native American settlements retained much of their ability to be self-sustaining and live close to nature. They were almost certainly far more attractive to Europeans than the disrupted life of Indians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

But it was not just Indian life that some New England settlers found more attractive than the rigid Puritan society from which they were snatched. English captives originally taken by Indians who were ransomed from the Indians by French settlers and adopted French Catholicism also typically sought to stick with their new lives. This phenomenon has been documented and analyzed by Axtell in The Invasion Within.*6

While Axtell painstakingly examines multiple layers of both spiritual and coercive factors involved in the conversion of Indians to Christianity and other European values, his examination of why white settlers were attracted to Indian spiritual values and lifestyles is less probing. This most likely demonstrates the limitations imposed by a mainstream, Eurocentric cultural perspective. It limits the analyst’s historical imagination in fully comprehending indigenous cultural appeal. This is made evident when Axtell’s analysis of settler conversions falls short of and even contradicts the rest of his book, which focuses on the nuances of Jesuit and Anglican spiritual conversion strategies. After documenting the numbers of conversions of white settlers to Indian and French culture, Axtell barely questions why some settlers may have found Catholicism and Native spirituality, not to mention indigenous and French lifestyles, more appealing than Puritan culture. This is all the more remarkable given the title and theme of his book: a contest of cultures.

Axtell stresses that the conflict between the settler-colonists and the indigenous peoples was at its foundation a struggle for the hearts and minds of opponents:

The contest of cultures in colonial North America was far from one sided. Despite superior technologies, aggressive religions, prolific populations, and well-articulated ideologies of imperialism, the French and English invaders enjoyed no monopoly of success in converting enemies to their way of life. In fact, the Indian defenders of the continent were more successful, psychologically if not numerically, than either of their European rivals. . . . the Indians, despite all odds, succeeded in seducing French and English colonists in numbers so alarming to European sensibilities that the natives were conceded to be, in effect, the best cultural missionaries and educators on the continent.3

For me, this paragraph exemplifies both the strength and the weakness of non-Indian academic attempts to understand the Native American experience. On the positive side, a well-honed intellect knows how to answer some questions and brings masses of factual and analytical material to bear. On the other hand, even a honed rational intellect can be blind to certain dimensions of spirituality. Although Axtell tunes in to the appeal of Jesuit Christianity for Indians, he does not even ask about the comparative appeal of Native American spirituality, or for that matter the Catholic faith, for seventeenth-century Anglican and Puritan settler-colonists.

Perhaps the conversion of English abductees can be understood with a simple act of historical imagination. What was the single greatest physical, psychological, and spiritual challenge facing settler-colonists on a daily basis? The answer is obvious and is found in settler journals. Above and beyond the threat of Indian raiding parties or wars involving competing European nations was the ferocity of Mother Nature, the vast and mysterious wilderness. It initially threatened, or destroyed, every colonial settlement effort. Neither Anglican nor Puritan nor Catholic cosmology dealt with this matter. They simply relegated the “desolate wilderness” to a devilish status of chaos, to be tamed and turned as quickly as possible into a replica of European agriculture.

No settler notion illustrates the blind folly of this worldview better than the miserably failed efforts of mid-seventeenth-century English and French colonizers to persuade Indians to give up their sustainable seminomadic practices of hunting and gathering, or settlement agronomy, which was based on growing such traditional foods as the Three Sisters, a traditional interplanting of corn, squash, and beans. The Indians were using hoes made of clamshells. The French and English wanted them to settle down in one place, use plows and other tools they could buy, take on debt (which would be a form of control), and work longer hours to produce food. White settlers were troubled and confounded by the bounty that Indians gained from their “primitive” techniques while the new arrivals often labored to produce enough food.

Equally disorienting for settlers was the fact that their Eurocentric worldview and religion did not adequately acknowledge the magnificent spiritual bounty and natural gifts that Mother Earth offered in the New World. The Earth that the settlers claimed was, for them, merely a resource to be harvested, mined, and exploited. Native Americans, in stark contrast, revered Mother Earth as sacred, viewing flora and fauna as their kin. Native Americans both embraced and felt the embrace of this natural world.

While Axtell states that the Indians “were conceded to be, in effect, the best cultural missionaries and educators on the continent,” he fails to inquire about how indigenous peoples came to this knowledge. Had he done so, he would have discovered that it was Mother Earth and the great wilderness, the endless forest. That was the sacred text, the equivalent of the Bible, for indigenous people.

The ability of Native Americans to make the natural world meaningful to the settlers, when it had been illegible and fearsome to Europeans, most likely played a prominent role in settler conversions. Today the same message is bringing people around the globe to a greater appreciation of the wisdom of indigenous cultures. It is no coincidence that this interest grows as natural phenomena are once again seemingly more threatening, more inscrutable, and beyond our ability to manage.

I suspect that a careful rereading of the journals of captive and abducted settlers will eventually reveal a record of spiritual encounters with the natural world similar to that which I am personally documenting in this book. Historians will need to read carefully between the lines, because such sentiments would have been buried beneath layers of cultural blindness and a lack of vocabulary adequate to express engagement with an animist worldview. Only when this chapter of colonial history is finally written will we fully understand the dynamics of the “contest of cultures” that began in the seventeenth century and continues to the present. Only then will we be able to fully benefit from the crosscurrents of such cultural interaction.

Je suis une personne abductée; nous sommes tous des personnes abductées*7

How does this apply to me and to my journey of spiritual discovery? I continually ask if, like Kateri Tekakwitha, I am an outsider in my own culture of birth, and if I am on the verge of finding something more meaningful and informative in a spiritually enriching alternative placed before me. How many of us awaken now daily feeling like strangers in a new “desolate wilderness” not of our own creation?

I have also tried to honestly portray my own journey, even referring to the appearance of ancestral spirits and forest kin as something like a SWAT team intervention bursting into my secularly ordered world. It is not a far-fetched leap of imagination to see parallels between my somewhat compelled awakening and the experiences of the seventeenth-century abductees. I will develop this notion in later chapters. For now I will simply state that many are the days when I awaken on the Indian side of the looking glass, and I hesitate to fully leave behind the nighttime peace of the sleeping porch and the sounds of my natural kin to step back into the house and my world of modern conveniences and an impersonal, mechanistic worldview. In such moments I must ask myself if it is my ancestors and natural kin who have abducted me, or if it is my everyday surroundings with their incessant drumbeat of advertising, noise, and bright lights that have abducted my spirit instead.

With that heightened sense of self-awareness and sense of kinship with my subject matter, I now return to Kateri’s story.

From Stumbling Pathfinder to Visionary Leader

We are stepping back into Kateri’s world at a time when conflict over religious beliefs, practices, and affiliations was disrupting the longhouse of her adopted family.

Kateri, then still called Tekakwitha, was adding fuel to the fires of family discontent when she balked at other traditional nonreligious tribal practices. For example, she resisted the idea of a betrothal at age thirteen, when such an event normally occurred. In 1673, when she was seventeen, this conflict reached a boiling point when her adoptive mother and an aunt arranged for another ceremony of betrothal, from which she fled and hid in the forest. Her relatives and community then unleashed a campaign of insults, threats, and punitive workloads in an unsuccessful attempt to compel the independent-minded young woman to comply with their expectations.

In 1674, Tekakwitha began studying the catechism*8 with a Jesuit priest. Here records disagree significantly. Some accounts, such that of Claude Chauchetiѐre, one of her two contemporary biographers, suggest that she was persecuted for her independent beliefs, especially as they became increasingly associated with Christianity.4 Some noncontemporaries report that she suffered from accusations of sorcery and even experienced violence for her embrace of Christianity. For example, one standard account reports that “harassed, stoned, and threatened with torture in her home village, she fled 200 miles (320 km) to the Christian Indian mission of St Francis Xavier at Sault Saint-Louis, near Montreal.”5 The Dictionary of Canadian Biography states, without citing any sources, that her “conversion brought upon her a veritable persecution. She was even threatened with death.”6 Other accounts suggest that there were considerable tensions, but nothing bordering on coercion, from her indigenous family and community.

Even with such uncertainty and ambiguity in historical accounts, it is reasonable to assume that the psychological toll on Tekakwitha must have been mounting. As a result, she journeyed northward in 1676 at the age of nineteen. She joined a growing number of female Iroquois converts at the Jesuit mission of St. Francis Xavier Mission at SaultSaint-Louis. Here she was baptized and assumed the Christian name Catherine, Kateri in Mohawk.

To understand the process of missionary conversions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in particular the case immediately before us, we need to understand Kateri’s formal adoption of Christianity within her historical and unique biographical context.7

First, the possession and exercise of power in New France during Kateri’s lifetime was uniquely, if fleetingly, balanced. Competing French, English, and Dutch spheres of influence kept these aspiring colonial powers in a precarious and ever-changing state, where none were totally secure. Each of the European colonizers sought to use a shifting set of alliances with Native American tribes in order to gain dominance in surrogate struggles for European wars that were fought partly in North America. However, indigenous peoples were more than pawns in a foreign chess game of realpolitik and diplomacy. They too used shifting alliances with foreign allies and adversaries to their own benefit. Eventually these fluid alliances would be formalized and stabilized, with clear spheres of influence and growing European military and cultural hegemony. But during Kateri’s lifetime, the kind of settler-colonial domination that came to characterize eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America did not yet apply. It would be a mistake to project a notion of clear and unambiguous dominance, either military or cultural, backward in time.

Second, before making harsh judgments about the purportedly unilateral imposition of European religious practices upon indigenous spiritual blank slates, we need to recognize that the appeal of foreign notions of spirituality can only be understood in the context of precolonial indigenous religious practices, which were strong and viable.

Such a perspective is called for when we examine the practice of celibacy by some native converts such as Kateri. We can begin by recognizing that many young women in Europe, over many centuries, joined holy orders and took up vows of celibacy in order to escape marriage and other difficulties, such as a high probability of death from multiple childbirths and low social and economic status in a patriarchal world. While the Catholic culture of seventeenth-century French Canada can hardly be represented as a feminist refuge, by comparative standards it may well have been a refuge for Kateri.

Third, we need to look at the harsh realities of Kateri’s own life and times. Her mother had been abducted by a Mohawk raiding party. Kateri’s mother had purportedly attracted the attention of a potential husband because of her hard work and physical strength. These may have been practical considerations, much as potential mates today quietly calculate the life opportunities (wealth, genetic heritage, social status) presented by various marital possibilities. As is so often the case with such a cold social calculus, the resulting relationships are exploitative and unsatisfying for the exploited. Such discouraging marital realities may have been quite pervasive in Kateri’s world.

Furthermore, in a warrior culture wracked by decades of continual brutal fighting and waves of epidemics, we could reasonably expect that the syndrome we now understand as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may have taken hold in Kateri’s world. These communal stressors could easily have spilled over to a further complication: domestic violence. This is not wild speculation. Reading between the lines of Chauchetiѐre’s seventeenth-century description of life at the Mission of Sault-Saint-Louis and the Kahnawake community, we can hear subtle hints of interpersonal, intrafamilial sexual violence.

Most significantly, we read over and over how both indigenous people and Jesuits fought to keep alcohol and drunkenness out of the Indian communities. The theme of pushing back against French colonial government and the fur traders’ efforts to introduce alcohol, even to the Sault-Saint-Louis mission community, permeates Chauchetiѐre’s account. Alcohol was an unwelcome plague on Native American society, one to which French officials turned a blind eye, or even promoted as a tool for rigging negotiations and trade deals. Drunken Indians could be, and often were, persuaded to sign agreements they barely understood when sober. Drunken Indians frequently recovered from alcohol-saturated trade negotiations to discover that some or all of their bartered goods were gone.

In the seventeenth century, as today, alcohol abuse went hand in hand with domestic violence. But it was not the sole cause, as we have evidence of such violence before the appearance of either alcohol or white settler-colonial culture. Forensic archaeologists have recently been looking at Native American skeletons in a new light. (Their findings are controversial and are currently limited to the Southwest and to a period many centuries before Kateri’s lifetime.) Female skeletons frequently display facial and head trauma that was not fatal but suggests a degree of ongoing, normalized, intrafamilial brutality. In addition, there is ample skeletal evidence that many Native American women suffered from physically brutal, occasionally fatal overwork.8

We can never know with any certainty what went on in Kateri’s adopted family, her longhouse, or her community. But it is reasonable to assume that, even within a matrilineal Native American society such as the Iroquois, high levels of intrafamilial violence against women might well have occurred in unprecedentedly stressful times. Kateri’s conversion and her decision to leave her place of birth need to be understood in this context.

Before constructing an idealized image of a cozy refuge within the Jesuit Iroquois community at Sault-Saint-Louis, to which Kateri fled, we need to confront Kateri’s religious practices during her time there. These practices were made evident to me just as I felt myself to be on the cusp of a fresh and less emotionally wrenching understanding of her life story, which had become a complicated historical account and spiritual journey for me.

The disquieting revelations appear when we examine what Kateri’s hagiographers pointed to as signs of her saintliness in her final years at Sault-Saint-Louis: her practices of mortification of the flesh. These facts have been used as evidence by some who portray Kateri as a young Mohawk woman victimized by Catholic missionary zealots and alien European cultural values. Although today the Catholic Church gives such practices scant attention, and delicately manages their rare continuation, the seventeenth century was very different. Such practices were relatively common. However, the acceptance of these practices in a culture and society a long ocean voyage away does not justify the conclusion that Kateri’s rather extreme use of self-mortification came primarily from foreign influences.

Among the Mohawk, various forms of mortification of the flesh, for example using thorns to pierce one’s flesh, extreme fasting, immersion in winter ice baths, and self-burning, were quite common among both men and women.9 Possibly, then, Kateri’s self-mortification, which has sometimes been attributed solely to Catholic teachings, was most likely a carryover from her own indigenous culture.

Even so, critics of Kateri’s conversion may still ask if her extreme practices of mortification might not have been encouraged to a pathological degree by the Jesuit environment at Sault-Saint-Louis. After all, some accounts of her death suggest a possible connection between her debilitating self-mortification and the illness that took her life. I will admit that I struggled with this possibility myself. But in the end I concluded that such an assertion reveals an unwillingness to let go of dogmatic antisettler and anticolonial narratives.

The answer is clear from the historical accounts. Kateri’s mentor priest is on the written record as seeing moderate practices of mortification of the flesh as a sign of Native American spiritual depth. But he also repeatedly cautioned Kateri against extreme and excessive indulgence in self-inflicted mortification, warning that in view of her poor health, such activity threatened her life.10 There is also evidence that Kateri may have moderated her practices somewhat in response to her mentor’s guidance.

Perhaps with this perspective, we can begin to understand Kateri’s final three years at Sault-Saint-Louis. In particular, we can better imagine the impact of her attempt to create something approximating a new religious group of Native people on the Île aux Hérons (Heron Island), across the river from the mission. The Jesuits may well have viewed this effort as a challenge to their own religious sodality, the Confraternity of the Holy Family,11 which was their attempt to create a social network that was one step short of a formal religious order, at the “praying town” of Sault-Saint-Louis.

Kateri was discouraged from creating a competing social structure, just as she was discouraged from overindulging in self-mortification. This is no coincidence. Her Jesuit mentors saw her unusually intense self-mortification practices as a powerful source of her unique claim to purity and hence spiritual authority. Such authority could become a centrifugal force in the Sault-Saint-Louis community, possibly challenging Jesuit control of Christian thought, behavior, and social networks. The level of this perceived threat is revealed in the account of a vision that Claude Chauchetiѐre, one of Kateri’s mentors, reported. In the vision Kateri appears and prophesizes the destruction of the community’s church.12

Kateri and the other female converts at Sault-Saint-Louis may also have been perceived as threatening traditional social and gender roles in Mohawk society. Kateri’s example of refusing marriage was just the beginning of what today might be viewed as a feminist challenge to male dominance. Defying her uncle, her tribe, and to some degree the Black Robes, she and others were criticized for their assertiveness.

During this time, such gender norm breaking was also an issue in other tribes. For example, at a tribal council of the Dene Chippewa, or “Montagnais,” male leaders blamed women’s assertiveness for a host of problems. Montagnais women in turn complained to the Jesuits as follows:

“It is you women”, they [the men] said to us [the women], “who are the cause of our misfortunes . . ., it is you who keep the demons among us. You do not urge to be baptized; you must not be satisfied to ask this favor only once from the Fathers, you must importune them. You are lazy about going to prayers; when you pass before the cross, you never salute it; you wish to be independent. Now know that you will obey your husbands.”13

These smoldering gender power struggles were to some degree an unanticipated consequence of Jesuit teachings. The Jesuits saw patriarchy as a social good and sought to undermine matrilineal traditions in Mohawk society, in which clan mothers appointed chiefs and could play a role in deposing them. Tribal membership descended matrilineally, as did property ownership. However, just as some Mohawk men sought to use their newfound Christian faith to erode female influence, Mohawk female converts used Christian teachings to reassert their traditional influence. They emphasized the central role of the Virgin Mary in Christian worship and took inspiration from numerous female saints. The new faith proved to be a double-edged sword in the struggle of gender politics.

If we examine the evidence of Kateri’s life at Sault-Saint-Louis, we may conclude that the Iroquois converts “did not become Christian in the way the Jesuits intended; instead they transformed Christianity into an Iroquois religion.”14

Kateri Tekakwitha died on April 17, 1680.

Path to Sainthood

Immediately upon her death, what many consider to be her first miracle was reported by Pierre Cholenec, her mentor and biographer, who wrote, “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.”15 This was announced at once as evidence of her saintliness. The transformation may have been a normal process of facial skin color change upon death. In fact, such questions are usually asked by the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which typically takes years to rigorously investigate claims of miracles and petitions for sainthood.

The fact that Kateri’s first possible miracle transformed her from a dark-skinned Native American to someone “lily-white,” like the French fleur-de-lis, has not been lost on Native Americans who see this as European society’s first cultural appropriation after her death. The same discomfort surrounds her title “Lily of the Mohawk.” To this day controversy surrounds the claim of lilylike whiteness. It is found even in the souvenir shop and museum attached to Kateri’s shrine in Kahnawake, where various images of her, some ancient and some contemporary, sit side by side. Some images portray her as dark-skinned, holding a turtle and a tree. Others portray her as fair-skinned, cosmetically perfect, and airbrushed, like a model on a fashion magazine cover, holding a white lily.

The Catholic Church typically requires verification of two miracles for sainthood. But in 1980, Pope John Paul II waived the requirement in Kateri’s case, citing the difficulty of confirming details of an incident said to have occurred hundreds of years ago. The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops states, “Kateri was declared Venerable by Pope Pius XII on January 3, 1943, and beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1980. On December 19, 2011, Pope Benedict XVI signed a decree officially acknowledging another miracle attributed to her intervention.”16

Again we must return to the context of Kateri’s death. New France, unlike Europe, did not have an established tradition of saints, nor did it have access to saints’ relics. For the faithful, and especially for missionaries, this was a serious problem. For Catholics, saints are intermediaries, potential bearers of messages and prayers to God. Their graves are pilgrimage sites. Their bones, and objects associated with them, become cherished items in ritual and in establishing sacred places.

In this context, the realm of sacred space ultimately depends upon the supply of and access to relics. Kateri died in a spiritual economy of scarcity of relics. Not surprisingly, her bones, dust from her tomb, and objects she purportedly touched all became important first-order relics immediately upon her death. Jesuits and Indian converts working to spread Christianity sought to have a personal connection with Kateri; her history after death includes numerous accounts of which ossuary remains went where. Fragments became smaller and smaller as the demand for her relics grew and her bones were divided.17 Within four years of her death, a small chapel was erected for her veneration at Kahnawake, and it began to attract pilgrims.

Momentum built over subsequent centuries to advance Kateri Tekakwitha’s status from that of just one of many holy people to beatification and then canonization. The process of canonization, official Catholic designation of sainthood, is typically long, drawn out, and bureaucratic. In 1943, Pope Pius XII signed a decree finally declaring Catherine Tekakwitha “Venerable.”18

The final hurdle en route to sainthood for the Catholic faithful is a certified full-blown second miracle. An opportunity for meeting this requirement for Kateri’s case occurred in 2006 with the cure of a young Indian boy in California who was purportedly near death with a facial wound and flesh-eating bacterial infection that medical science was unable to address successfully. Sister Kateri Mitchell, named for Kateri Tekakwitha and who is also a Mohawk, laid a relic of Kateri on the suffering boy’s pillow. His surprising turnaround and healing was declared a second miracle by Pope Benedict XVI in 2011.

In 2012, Kateri Tekakwitha entered the pantheon of Catholic sainthood, and the world took notice. The action was widely misreported as the first canonization of a Native American.

In fact, in 2002 the church had canonized Juan Diego, born Cuauhtlatoatzin (Talking Eagle) in 1474 and raised in the Aztec religion. In 1531, he had several visions of a young woman who was later venerated as Our Lady of Guadalupe. He is considered to be the first indigenous American to be canonized. But since he was born in Mexico, Kateri Tekakwitha is routinely, though inaccurately, recognized as the first American saint.

Welcome Visitations and Guides

When I finally finished exploring Kateri’s biography, I expected to get some closure on the questions that kept me awake so many nights writing and researching. But the facts of her biography and the web of analysis I had spun did not provide those insights.

Instead, deeper understanding first began to arrive—as is often the case in my life now—with gentle signals born on the wings of natural kin and expressed in their nonhuman voices. The first visitations occurred while I worked in the garden pondering questions about Kateri. When I wrote that she sometimes seemed to follow me everywhere, I was not exaggerating. Even my downtime activities did not escape unexpected visitations or insights, interrupting my other work. As a result, I needed to occasionally go inside and record what was happening or do a quick online search for a few more basic facts about Kateri that my musings demanded be answered sooner rather than later.

After one such break from harvesting onions, when I went back outside, I noticed two red-tailed hawks soaring above. Round and round they went, making their wonderful calls.

My first thoughts were, “Oh, listen to the bald eagles!” Then I remembered that movie soundtracks use the calls of red-tailed hawks instead of those of the bald eagle when showcasing birds of prey. Apparently Hollywood moviemakers do not consider the eagle’s true voice to be powerful and majestic enough to be used as the voice of their country’s symbol. As a result, I had once confused the two, and still often do.

The hawks returned several times over the following days, during which time I once again became quite preoccupied with Kateri, even into the middle of the night. As a result of my preoccupation and research, I was buried in a pile of biographical information, much of it fragmented and seemingly contradictory. As I began slowly digging out from under the mountain of stories, tributes, and records, I looked desperately for some facts that would give a deeper understanding of the saint as a whole person, her humanity.

But it was not data that pointed the way to deeper understanding. It was the message of the hawks. They alerted me to the fact that we often want our cultural symbols to be majestic in proportion to our understanding of the power invested in them. This projection of our own values is most disruptive when it is brought to bear on an event or life that is distant in time and place. There are no contemporaries to check facts.

Often we want our heroes and saints to be bold, loud, and commanding, like cymbals in a marching band. As a result we rarely listen to the subtler, gentler voices that speak wisely out of the past, sometimes just whispering as they bring messages designed to nudge us into reconsidering our preconceptions in a quieter, slower, and more reflective way.

In my investigation, the hawks were warning me, Kateri was suffering from the same fate she suffered in her life, and the fate suffered by the eagles. I was failing to hear her genuine voice. I was instead trying to give her the commanding voice of a red-tailed hawk when an eagle’s quieter wisdom was drifting in the air. I was imposing my notions of what an outspoken young Native American should be, even as I was confronted with fragments of a quite different story—about a troubled young soul seeking peace amid clashing human cultures by escaping into the forest.

The Canadian Lily of the Mohawk

One day, when Carolyn and I were first exploring the land in Vermont where we would eventually build our house, and before the Coy-Wolves greeted us, we walked around the boundary of wetlands that were part of our property. Among the many plants and wildflowers stood one remarkable white flower that I recognized as a lily. It grew on top of a stem that was two meters tall but no thicker than a pencil. I could not understand how such a delicate plant could stand in the wind. Our guide to Vermont wildflowers indicated that we had a Canada lily or meadow lily (Lilium canadense) in a somewhat rare white variation. We have never seen the flower again. The lily had made her glorious ephemeral appearance and then moved on.

At the time I imagined that a bird had transported the seed south from Canada. Or perhaps the plant was the descendant of a long line of ancestors who were slowly carried south on winds, in waters, or in soil moved 15,000 years ago by glaciers that plowed the valley of what would become the Champlain Sea.

Now, after encountering Kateri Tekakwitha, if and when this beautiful cousin ever returns to grace our wetlands, I will think of ki as “Lily of the Mohawk,” a fleur-de-lis who refused to be domesticated, and who stood tall because she was so deeply rooted in Mother Earth.

With such thoughts, I returned to the connection that our friend the Catholic deacon had used in introducing us to Kateri Tekakwitha: her role as patron saint of the environment. None of the historical sources I had consulted explained how she was given this attribution. The designation was not made in her Positio, the documents presented to the Vatican in support of her canonization. Kateri’s deep personal and cultural connections with the natural world rose to the forefront at the time of her canonization. Then church officials and Catholic ecology organizations decided to signal continuity with indigenous culture by informally declaring her status as patron saint of the environment.19 It was a spontaneous grassroots development, like the appearance of the lily in our wetland.

But the full implications of her Native origins, of a spirituality deeply rooted in continual connections with nature, still seemed more like an add-on than a core element of the official narrative. Bringing this to the forefront raises the risk of accusations that Catholic belief is being subordinated to Native American animism or pantheism (or vice versa). Catholic doctrine is somewhat ambiguous about the divine status of the natural world. From the Catholic perspective, the flora, fauna, and natural features of the Earth are the creation of God. They warrant reverence because they are God-given. But elevating the natural realm to the status of the sacred in its own right risks glorifying nature on its own, a notion that can make some Catholic theologians uncomfortable.

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Fig. 8.1. Canada lily found in Vermont

Photo courtesy of Kate Carter, author of Wildflowers of Vermont

Native Americans, by contrast, view Mother Earth as sacred. They ascribe spiritual equality to flora, fauna, and natural objects, clearly putting the natural realm on an equal basis with humans, and typically with the Creator as well. Proponents of Native American and Christian perspectives normally avoid emphasizing their differences and instead seek to emphasize common ground. There is nevertheless a difference in worldviews.

For me, this creative tension is the spiritual frontier where Kateri Tekakwitha comes alive. I find myself returning again and again to the names of the two villages where she spent most of her life: Caughnawaga, along the Mohawk River, and Kahnawake, along the St. Lawrence River. Both place names are Roman-alphabet representations of the same Mohawk word for “at the wild water,” the turbulent waters of rapids found in the rivers adjacent to both of Kateri’s dwelling places. Both place names reflect the power of crosscurrents and the challenges of navigating such turbulence.

Mother Nature was once again acting as my inspiration and guide. Just as names given to Native American people are said to reflect something of their essence, Caughnawaga and Kahnawake reveal a deeper truth. They were places of intense cultural, spiritual, and social crosscurrents. Such currents are capable of knocking one off firm footing, as I discovered at age twelve when I attempted to cross knee-deep rapids in the Moose River near my family’s summer cottage. I was nearly knocked off my feet and swept away. Kateri must have experienced such a struggle to remain on her own two spiritual feet many times.

A brief escape from being knee-deep in the undercurrents of crosscultural encounters must have been a cherished moment in Kateri’s life. That gift was given to her on a ten-day journey from her place of birth northward to Kahnawake. She traveled by canoe through the entire length of what is today Lake George and Lake Champlain. The journey would have been breathtakingly beautiful and peaceful—a pilgrimage more than an escape.

Pilgrimages typically are ordeals, acts of self-abnegation and purification, undertaken en route to a destination where a transformative spiritual experience is anticipated. But in Kateri’s case, her journey toward a religious community may have been part of her spiritual destiny, both a delight and an important contribution to her emerging identity as both a Christian and Native American religious leader.

 

Dual Spirituality in Native American Religion

Native American history written both by indigenous people and European descendants typically discusses assimilation, and religious encounters in particular, in terms of absolute conversion, as if the process were, for good or bad, a one-way street, or, more appropriately, a toll highway with a high admission price. That price is complete and total renunciation of traditional beliefs so that a new worldview can take root unchallenged. Indeed for many Native Americans, assimilation and conversion were akin to being dipped, or nearly drowned, in a bath of chlorine bleach, from which they emerged, as is alleged with Kateri Tekakwitha, miraculously and entirely whitened. This is the assumption behind the dictum of American Indian school founder Captain Richard Henry Pratt: “Kill the Indian and save the man.”

However, careful reading between the lines of indigenous biography suggests a different and far more complex tale—one of dual spirituality. While the assertion is superficially contradictory, more often than not Native Americans assimilated or converted while continuing to boldly affirm much of their traditional spirituality. Privately, out of the reach of the spying eyes of Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, they continued to practice and embrace traditional ways. When Charles Eastman, the most famous late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Native American, grew old, he returned to his Canadian cabin in the woods and the spiritual context of his Indian youth. Chicago’s model success story of assimilation, Dr. Carlos Montezuma, returned to his reservation to die. Black Elk, the great Lakota medicine man, continued to engage with his traditional spirituality while acting as a Catholic catechist.

 

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Fig. 8.2. Kateri’s journey north

Depiction courtesy of St. Kateri Tekakwitha Interpretative Center, Kahnawake

Indeed, as I reflected on the rapids that run near Kateri’s Kahnawake shrine and our residence across the St. Lawrence, I was reminded of just how much of her world and that of the settlers in seventeenth-century New France and New England was shaped by the natural environment. Three centuries later, insulated from the natural elements by modern technology, we can easily fail to understand how the lives of Native Americans and settler-colonists were shaped and dominated by their natural surroundings.

This realization reminded me that intellectual training, although a useful analytical tool, can serve as blinders. For months, I had been looking at Kateri Tekakwitha’s world as if it were shaped primarily by social forces. If there were crosscurrents, they were cultural. Despite my work on environmental issues, I was slow to recognize that one of the most important parts of Kateri’s message to us in the twenty-first century is about our continuing dependence on and subjugation to the forces of nature.

I struggle daily to free myself from the prevailing culture, which suggests that we control Mother Nature. Living across the St. Lawrence River, opposite Kateri’s shrine in Lachine, is a reminder that recent human history is built on our aspiration to dominate nature. Every time I go bicycling along the Lachine Canal, I am aware of the fact that humans eventually built transport routes around the barrier rapids in the St. Lawrence River at Kahnawake. The Lachine Canal, dug and built along the north shore of the St. Lawrence in the early decades of the nineteenth century, was an enormous effort that came at the price of many lives. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway on the south shore in 1959 was heralded as a modern engineering marvel. Unfortunately, it was constructed partly on land taken from the Mohawk Reserve at Kahnawake in exchange for meager payments on appropriated land and a swimming pool as compensation for miles of lost riverfront and beaches.20 The Mohawk lost direct access to their fishing grounds. Today, as you stand at the entrance to the Kateri shrine, you may see giant ships passing, a stone’s throw away.

Some of us are slowly returning to a worldview recognizing that forces of nature are not overcome without a great cost. It is a lesson that Kateri Tekakwitha, the Mohawks and the other indigenous peoples, and the European settlers of her day would have easily understood. They negotiated continually with Mother Nature. They traveled in birchbark canoes, their sailing ships being useless in shallow rivers or through and around rapids. The rhythm of their commerce was determined by the seasons. Their very survival depended upon the bounty and gifts of the land, forests, and waterways. Such a humbly realistic worldview is slowly regaining traction in contemporary thought and among some policy makers.

But many of our leaders, in whose hands our species’ destiny rests, are in denial about the environmental crises before them. In my scheme of the four pathways to knowledge, they seem unable to observe. Often they do not reflect, except to construct elaborate arguments rejecting the findings of science, which challenge their blind pursuit of shortterm economic gain. In their hermetically sealed urban penthouses and offices, they are beyond the reach of visitations or direct spiritual connections with Mother Earth.

Regrettably, many of those who do see the problems believe we can bioengineer our way out of current environmental crises. They are determined to protect our levels of consumption and are very little concerned about protecting Mother Earth. As a result, the number of environmental refugees, those forced to relocate because of flooding, lack of water, or lack of arable land, is increasing and will most likely increase exponentially in the coming decades.

Suddenly I got it. Kateri, the patron saint of the environment, is also known as the patron saint of refugees. How appropriate to our times, as increasing numbers of refugees and migrants suffer environmental pressures. With this realization, I had a vision of ever increasing numbers of supplicants praying to Kateri for environmental relief—for real miracles, on the order of the parting of the Red Sea and a rescue for human and animal refugees on the order of Noah’s Ark.

Kateri Tekakwitha bears an urgent message, a wake-up call: our most profound moral obligation, as Native Americans or as participants in more mainstream society, is to go beyond being good stewards of the environment. Stewardship implies that Mother Earth just needs some tending so that she can continue to service our human needs. In fact, we can only save her and ourselves by recognizing, as Kateri’s spiritual traditions, both indigenous and Christian, affirm: the Earth is sacred, and it requires and deserves our utmost devotion. Perhaps we can come more easily to this realization when we have our spiritual feet rooted in two cultures, each one asking the other challenging questions.

I am left with an image of Kateri and her contemporaries worshiping their creator in the forest at Kahnawake. It too was their church, alongside, surrounding, and embracing a small wooden chapel. Kateri’s biographers record her hanging small wooden crosses on trees and engaging in rituals in the forest.21 Actions speak louder than words, or so the expression goes. In the absence of Kateri’s own words, such actions speak most eloquently.