Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (review)

Allan Greer is Professor of American Colonial History at the University of Toronto, with several works to his credit. Here he focuses upon the life of the seventeenth-century Mohawk Christian convert, Catherine (Kateri) Tekakwitha, whom he claims to be the most fully documented Indian in New World colonial history. Almost all of that documentation is hagiography. Greer's goal is to create history from hagiography; therefore, he analyzes the hagiographers as well as their subject and their mutual contexts. Greer takes especial interest in the figure of Tekakwitha's biographer, Jesuit Claude Chauchetière; indeed, this is a "dual biography" (p. x) of the Mohawk and the Jesuit.

After three years of association, Chauchetière observed Tekakwitha's "beautiful death" in 1680 at Kahnawake, south of Montreal, and upon reflection, he came to see her "as his spiritual superior and view his encounter with her as a transformative moment" (p. 5) in his troubled, mystical life. Her tranquil last words, "I will love you in heaven" (p. 17), moved him to wonder: might she have been a saint? He and his fellow Jesuit, Pierre Cholenec, could not believe it at first, for "the fact that she was an Indian" (p. 22). Jesuit martyrs could be saints, but surely not a savage woman, even a fervent convert! Over time, however, they became convinced of her sanctity; both penned spiritual biographies of her and spread her fame.

Based upon their writings, Greer tells of Tekakwitha's life, from her 1656 birth to an Algonquin mother, possibly an adopted captive of the Mohawks, who was said to have been a "devout, baptized Catholic" (p. 25). In the orbit of Dutch trade and French attack in the Mohawk River valley, her village underwent "major crises . . . affected by the colonial presence" (p. 31). Greer attests to her childhood handiwork, typical of Mohawk women—crafting utensils and preparing meals. Greer does a fine job in matching the Jesuits' testimony about her life to ethnographic sources, demonstrating her growing acumen as an industrious Iroquois woman. But if she was typical in most ways, she stood out in several, including her conversion.

Her first encounter with a Catholic missionary was in her eighteenth year, as the French Jesuits had entered her village, beginning in 1667. It took her eight years to show her interest in their program, but when she did, in 1675, her impulse impressed Father Jacques de Lamberville, and she was baptized in 1676. What attracted her, and how did she change, once she was baptized? Greer suggests that the greatest attraction—and the greatest change—was the proffered migration from the Mohawk to the St. Lawrence valley, into the heart of Canadian New France, a seal of "politico-religious affiliation" (p. 50).

She was one of many Mohawks in the 1670's whom the Jesuits encouraged to leave their home villages and re-establish themselves as French Catholic allies. Those who left constituted a "faction rallying around the cross and the French alliance" (p. 56), and their leaving weakened the Mohawks; however, their migration did not make them any less Mohawk. This is Greer's primary point about Tekakwitha: even as a Christian, "she needs to be recognized as a Mohawk girl, her existence framed by the life of the Mohawk longhouse, her fate bound up in the vagaries of Mohawk history" (p. 57).

Greer describes her in 1677: "So she came, at the age of twenty-one, a baptized Christian who had never seen a church, never tasted a communion wafer, never met more than two or three Europeans, to the banks of the St. Lawrence River and the newly constructed Iroquois village where she would spend the rest of her days" (p. 58).

What was this place to which she came, about the same time as Chauchetière? It was "both a Jesuit mission, that is to say an instrument of directed religious change, and a self-governing Catholic Iroquois community" (p. 90). The place maintained "a...