Born in 1656, probably in Ossernenon, a Mohawk village near present-day Auriesville in upper New York State, Tekakwitha (Tegakwitha, Tegakouita) was the child of a Mohawk father and a mother who was a Christianized Algonquian. When she was four her parents and brother died in a smallpox epidemic, and she was reared thereafter by her uncle, an anti-Christian Mohawk chief. From about 1666 she lived in the village of Caughnawaga, near present-day Fonda, New York.
In 1667 Jesuit missionaries came among the tribe, and she apparently was strongly influenced by them, although she must have had contacts with Christianized Indians from time to time as well. In 1675 she asked Father Jacques de Lamberville for baptism, and after instruction she was baptized on Easter, April 18, of the following year, being given then the name Catherine (rendered Kateri in Mohawk speech). Her conversion brought her a great deal of hostility, even persecution, from fellow Native Americans, who were already suspicious of her pious ways and her refusal to marry. In 1677 she fled 200 miles to the mission of St. Francis Xavier at Sault St. Louis near Montreal. There she took her first communion on Christmas Day of 1677. She lived a life of great spirituality and asceticism that impressed all who knew her at the mission, and she became known as the ╥Lily of the Mohawks.╙ In 1678 she was enrolled in the Confraternity of the Holy Family. In 1679 she took a private vow of chastity.
In 1680 Tekakwitha fell seriously ill and died on April 17 at the mission. After her death devotion to her spread among the French and the Indians of the region, and many miracles were credited to her intervention. In 1884 the third plenary council of the Roman Catholic church, meeting in Baltimore, petitioned Rome to initiate steps toward the canonization of Kateri Tekakwitha. With the formal presentation of her cause for beatification in 1932 she became the first North American Indian ever to be proposed for sainthood; in 1943 she was recognized as possessed of heroic virtue.
