St. Kateri Tekakwitha

Who they were

Tekakwitha was born at Ossernenon on the Mohawk River, daughter of a Mohawk chief and an Algonquin Christian mother. Smallpox took her parents and her brother when she was four and left her scarred and with damaged sight. Her name is often rendered she who bumps into things, and she wore a blanket over her head against the light.

Raised by an uncle hostile to the missionaries, she met the faith her mother had carried and, at nineteen, asked for baptism, taking the name Kateri for Catherine of Siena. The cost was immediate. She was mocked, stoned, refused food for keeping Sunday, and pressured toward a marriage she had quietly resolved against, and she finally walked two hundred miles north to the mission village of Kahnawake near Montreal. There she lived four luminous years, teaching children, caring for the sick and the old, and praying in the woods with a cross of lashed branches, and died at twenty four. The witnesses at her deathbed, Native and French alike, recorded that the smallpox scars faded from her face within minutes of her death. She was canonized in 2012, the first Native American saint.

Why people turn to St. Kateri Tekakwitha

The care of creation, held with Francis of Assisi, and hers is the outdoors patronage rooted in a people's actual relationship with the land. Native Catholics, first and by right. And young people whose families punished their faith.

How to ask their intercession

Outdoors if you can, which was her documented practice. Pray a decade among trees for the care of creation, and for anyone paying a family price for belief.