St. Kateri Tekakwitha
The first Native American saint. Smallpox took her parents and most of her eyesight.
Kateri was Mohawk, born near what is now Auriesville, New York. Smallpox went through her village when she was four. It killed her mother, her father, and her baby brother, and it left her with scars on her face and eyes that could not handle bright light. Her name, Tekakwitha, has to do with feeling your way along.
She was raised by an uncle who wanted nothing to do with the missionaries, and she became Catholic anyway at nineteen. The village turned on her for it. Children threw stones.
So she walked. About two hundred miles, mostly on foot, to a Christian Mohawk settlement near Montreal, where she lived four more years and died at twenty four. People called her the Lily of the Mohawks. She was canonized in 2012, the first Native American to be.
St. Kateri Tekakwitha facts for kids
- The first Native American saint, canonized in 2012
- Smallpox at age four left her partly blind and scarred
- She walked roughly 200 miles to a village where she could practice her faith
- Patron of ecology and the environment, alongside St. Francis
Feast day: July 14 · Patron of the environment and Native peoples
Proper to the calendars of the United States and Canada.
St. Kateri, help me keep going toward the good thing even when it costs me.