Born in a Mohawk Village in 1656 in western New York, she was the daughter of a Mohawk Chief and an Algonquin woman who had been captured during a raid. 

Her mother, Kahenta, was Baptized into The Church by French Missionaries. 

Kateri’s Mohawk village was quite diverse and made up of a number of different natives who were absorbed as full members because so many in the Mohawk nation had been taken by European diseases. 

Then a smallpox epidemic took both of her parents and her brother, smallpox left Kateri disfigured and partially blind. 

She was adopted by her uncle, who also replaced her father as the Mowhawk Chief. 

The period was one of almost constant warfare over the fur trade in western New York with the Mohawk allied with the Dutch and the Huron with the French. 

Eventually, the Mohawk were forced into a treaty with the French which required them to accept Jesuit missionaries in their villages. 

Kateri’s uncle hated the Jesuits, whom he referred to as “Black robes” but Kateri enjoyed talking with them and eventually was converted and Baptised on Easter Sunday, taking the name Kateri-Catherine. 

Because of her conversion, she was treated as a slave and when she refused to work on Sunday was denied food. 

Eventually, she escaped and made a 200-mile trek to a village near Montreal. There, she took a vow of chastity. 

During Holy Week in 1680, her health began a rapid decline and she died that Wednesday. 

Immediately after her death, scars and defects caused by suffering and smallpox went away and she became radiant and beautiful. 

In the weeks after her death several people reported being visited by her, and she told one of her friends: “ I have come to say goodbye, I am on my way to Heaven.” 

She was Canonized in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI.

St. Kateri-Catherine Tekakwita, please pray for us.