Mohawk Saint

On October 21, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI canonized Saint Kateri Tekakwitha as the first Native North American saint. Mohawk Saint is a work of history that situates her remarkable life in its seventeenth century setting, a time of wars, epidemics, and cultural transformations for the Indian
peoples of the northeast. The daughter of a Algonquin mother and an Iroquois father, Catherine/Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680) has become known over the centuries as a Catholic convert so holy that, almost immediately upon her death, she became the object of a cult. Today she is revered as a
patron saint by Native Americans and the patroness of ecology and the environment by Catholics more generally, the first Native North American proposed for sainthood.

Tekakwitha was born at a time of cataclysmic change, as Native Americans of the northeast experienced the effects of European contact and colonization. A convert to Catholicism in the 1670s, she embarked on a physically and mentally grueling program of self-denial, aiming to capture the spiritual
power of the newcomers from across the sea. Her story intersects with that of Claude Chaucheti�re, a French Jesuit of mystical tendencies who came to America hoping to rescue savages from sin and paganism. But it was Claude himself who needed help to face down his own despair. He became convinced
that Tekakwitha was a genuine saint and that conviction gave meaning to his life. Though she lived until just 24, Tekakwitha's severe penances and vivid visions were so pronounced that Chaucheti�re wrote an elegiac hagiography shortly after her death.

With this richly crafted study, Allan Greer has written a dual biography of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha and Chaucheti�re, unpacking their cultures in Native America and in France. He examines the missionary and conversion activities of the Jesuits in Canada, and explains the Indian religious practices
that interweave with converts' Catholic practices. He also relates how Tekakwitha's legend spread through the hagiographies and to areas of the United States, Canada, Europe, and Mexico in the centuries since her death. The book also explores issues of body and soul, illness and healing, sexuality
and celibacy, as revealed in the lives of a man and a woman, from profoundly different worlds, who met centuries ago in the remote Mohawk village of Kahnawake.


"The finest scholarly treatment to date of Catherine (Kateri) Tekakwitha."--Lisa Poirier, Church History

"The finest scholarly treatment to date of Catherine (Kateri) Tekakwitha.... No university library should be without it. It is sufficiently accessible for undergraduates, and sufficiently sophisticated for specialists."--Lisa Poirer, Church History

"Greer masterfully sheds light on everything he writes about."--CHOICE

"Mohawk Saint is quite simply the best book I have read on the momentous and vexed encounter of Europeans and Native Americans in the Early Modern world. A must-read for anyone interested in New France or colonial Native Americans, it provides an intimate and imaginative portrait of both the Mohawk
Catherine and the French missionaries with whom she interacted in the seventeenth-century Praying Iroquois community of Kahnawake."--H-Net

"In rescuing the 'lily of the Mohawks' form her hagiographers, Allan Greer has produced an utterly fascinating volume."--Michael Walsh