Saint Kateri Tekakwitha

The only survivor in her family

Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 in Ossernenon, in what is now Auriesville, New York, the child of a Mohawk father and a Christianized Algonquin mother. At age four, smallpox swept through her family; she alone survived, left with facial scars and damaged eyesight that stayed with her for the rest of her life.

A faith discovered at eleven, claimed at twenty

At eleven, she was deeply impressed by the words of three visiting Jesuits — likely the first white Christians she had ever encountered. She began shaping her life around what she'd heard from them, and at twenty she was formally instructed in the faith and baptized Catherine, rendered in Mohawk as Kateri, by the Jesuit missionary Jacques de Lamberville.

Fleeing two hundred miles for the freedom to practice it

That baptism came at a cost. Harassed, stoned, and threatened with torture in her home village, Tekakwitha fled roughly two hundred miles to the mission of St. Francis Xavier at Sault Saint Louis, near present-day Montreal, established by French Jesuits. There she came to be known as the "Lily of the Mohawks," recognized for her kindness, her prayer life, and the suffering she had endured for her faith.

Recognition centuries later

Pope John Paul II beatified her in 1980. In December 2011, after evaluating the testimony of a boy whose flesh-eating bacterial infection disappeared following prayers for her intercession, Pope Benedict XVI recognized the miracle; she was canonized the following October, becoming the first Indigenous person of North America raised to sainthood by the Catholic Church. She is also honored today as a patron saint of ecology.