Kateri Tekakwitha
Saint Kateri Tekakwitha is the patroness of Native Americans by a simple and luminous fact: the “Lily of the Mohawks” was the first Native American to be raised to the altars, a Mohawk-Algonquin woman whose holiness showed that the highest sanctity belongs to her people too. She is patroness of ecology and the environment because she lived close to the natural world she was born into, finding God in the forests and rivers of her homeland — making her, in modern devotion, a fitting heavenly guardian of creation. She is invoked by exiles and the persecuted because she was driven from her village for her faith, fleeing some two hundred miles to a Christian settlement near Montreal, where she lived in prayer and penance until her early death at twenty-four — when, tradition records, the smallpox scars on her face vanished and her skin shone.
Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, known as the “Lily of the Mohawks,” was the first Native American to be canonized. Born in 1656 in present-day New York to a Mohawk father and Algonquin Christian mother, she survived smallpox which left her face scarred and her vision impaired. She was baptized at age twenty and lived a life of remarkable prayer, penance, and charity until her death at twenty-four.
