The ‘Lily of the Mohawks,’ a young Indigenous laywoman of 17th-century Canada whose radical devotion made her the first Native American saint.

Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680) was a Mohawk-Algonquin laywoman, born in present-day New York and later resettled at a Christian Mohawk mission near Kahnawake, Quebec, Canada, who embraced Catholicism as a teenager despite fierce opposition from her own community and devoted the rest of her short life to prayer, penance, and consecrated virginity. She died at Kahnawake at about 23, already regarded as holy by those who knew her.

Quick Facts

• Born: 1656, Ossernenon (near Auriesville), New York
• Died: April 17, 1680, Kahnawake, Quebec, Canada (age about 23)
• Venerated as: Layperson
• Feast Day: July 14 (general Roman calendar)
• Beatified: 1980 · Canonized: 2012

Who Was Saint Kateri Tekakwitha?

Kateri Tekakwitha was born to a Mohawk father and a Christian Algonquin mother, and survived a smallpox epidemic as a child that scarred her face and left her with impaired eyesight, giving her the name Tekakwitha, sometimes translated as ‘she who bumps into things.’ Baptized as a young woman against considerable family and community pressure, she fled her village for the Christian mission settlement at Kahnawake, where she embraced a life of intense prayer, fasting, and voluntary penance, and took a private vow of perpetual virginity.

Historical Setting

Seventeenth-century Mohawk communities were undergoing intense pressure from European colonization, disease, and competing missionary and traditional religious influences, and a young woman’s choice to convert to Catholicism and refuse marriage carried real social risk and, according to accounts of her life, hostility from relatives who saw her new faith as a rejection of Mohawk identity and obligation.

Why the Church Remembers Saint Kateri Tekakwitha

The Church remembers Kateri Tekakwitha for the intensity of her personal devotion under real social pressure, and for becoming, through her canonization, a powerful symbol of the Church’s recognition of Indigenous holiness and of the possibility of authentic Catholic faith fully embraced within, rather than opposed to, Indigenous identity and dignity.

Canonization and Feast Day

Kateri Tekakwitha was beatified in 1980 by Pope John Paul II and canonized in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI, becoming the first Native American saint recognized by the Catholic Church. Her feast is kept on July 14 in the general Roman calendar, and locally on April 17, the anniversary of her death, in some places.

What Catholics Can Learn Today

Kateri’s willingness to embrace her faith even at the cost of alienation from her own family and community speaks to anyone who has felt torn between a religious conviction and the expectations of the people closest to them. Her canonization also stands as an important affirmation that Indigenous peoples’ embrace of Christianity need not mean the erasure of their own cultural identity.

A Prayer to Saint Kateri Tekakwitha

Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, Lily of the Mohawks, pray for Indigenous Catholics around the world seeking to live their faith with integrity and cultural pride. Help all who face family opposition for the sake of conscience to find in you a model of gentle, unwavering perseverance. Amen.

Sources

• Vatican.va, canonization records of Pope Benedict XVI (2012)
• Butler’s Lives of the Saints, revised edition
• EWTN, Saints and Angels