Késsinnimek - Roots - Racines

Mon Petit Coin   by   Norm Léveillée

Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha
1656-1680

In honor of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha's feast day on July 14, my article will focus on this Mohawk-Algonquin Native American, who just happens to be "one of our relations".

As an introduction, I need to make the reader aware of my premise for writing this month's article on Tekakwitha, a Native American. For the most part, the literature on Native Americans has been written from the white man's perspective. Research by anthropologists has been conducted by the white man from his viewpoint. Movies have been created by white men writers. I am trying to point out that our information about the Native Americans has been skewed in favor of what the white man imagined an Indian to be. I hope to give you, the reader, two sides to Kateri Tekakwitha's life: my own from the Catholic viewpoint and from an author, a white man also, who looked at her life from the Indian view. I will also incorporate ideas from two other sources: a white Englishman and a red man.

There has been much written about Tekakwitha from very few resources. There are two Jesuit missionaires, contemporaries of Kateri, who gave us a glimpse into her life, from the Catholic view. Apparently, she didn't read nor write; as a result, we have no words from her except what she uttered on her deathbed "Jesu, Wari" - Jesus, Mary. The two Jesuits are Father Pierre Cholenec, who was her spiritual advisor at Kahnawaké and wrote a biography -Vie de Catherine Tegakoüita (Tr. Catherine Tekakwitha: Her Life by William Lonc, SJ) shortly after her death, and Father Claude Chauchetière, who painted a portrait - the only known portrait of Kateri - after she appeared to him several years after her death.

I discovered Kateri Tekakwitha in December 1999 as I was browsing through the Prayer Card section in the gift shop at Our Lady of LaSallette Shrine in Attlebora, MA. The card of an Indian maiden attracted my attention, since I had been researching and writing about my Algonquin 8th great-grandmother Marie Mite8ameg8k8e. I gathered all books, pamphlets and information from various websites in order to learn all that I could about Tekakwitha. All these works were written by white Catholics. Along with my family, I organized a pilgrimage to the three shrines dedicated to her life in New York and in Québec. I wanted and needed to see and feel where Tekakwitha, my cousin, was born, lived, met and adopted a white man's religion and died as a saint.

As a result of my research and pilgrimage voyage, I created an extensive website dedicated to Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha. ¹  I have also written a story about her, in English and French. Before continuing on with this article, I ask you, the reader, to please link to and read

A Litany to My Cousin
The research for my story is based on Father Cholenec's biography, both the French and English versions, as well as on the works contained in the bibliography noted below. ²
My work was created solely from the Christian Catholic viewpoint: Tekakwitha discovered the Christian God and adapted and assimilated her Mohawk/Algonquin way of life to reflect this discovery.

I have read three interesting texts about Native American history, from the Indian point of view: James Wilson's The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America, Daniel K. Richter's Facing East from Indian Country and Vine Deloria, Jr.'s Custer Died For Your Sins. However, for this article, I will refer predominatly to this book: Facing East from Indian Country - A Native History of Early America by Daniel K. Richter, which I discovered one day as I was browsing in one of our local bookstores. I chose this text because there is a chapter on Kateri Tekakwitha. I read the cover:

In the beginning, North America was Indian country. but only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers.

Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of the eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. Daniel Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the Unitied States.

Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeeth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces the new comers unleashed. Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires.

After reading a chapter on three Indians - Pocahontas, Kateri Tekakwitha and Metacomet - and how they related to the arrival of the Europeans, I decided to concentrate on one Indian, in one chapter of this book: Kateri Tekakwitha.

In his book, Daniel Richter pointed out that all information about Kateri Tekakwitha comes to us through two Jesuit priests: Fathers Pierre Cholenec and Claude Chauchetière.

He concludes his chapter on Tekakwitha by stating that

From an eastward-facing perspective, her story, like that of Pocahontas, rises from deep roots in her own culture and her own time. She symbolizes one of the many ways in which Native Americans tried to come to grips with the challenges of the seventeeth century by incorporating people, things, and ideas from Europe into a world still of their own making.³

How does Daniel Richter justify the above statement? Throughout his chapter on Tekakwitha, he points out, first of all, that Tekakwitha's story is really in the realm of the "myth", meaning that it is not based on scientific proof because her story has been transmitted to us through the works of two Jesuit priests: Pierre Cholenec and Claude Chauchetière, both of whom wrote for the Catholic reader. These religious colonizers had as their prime objective the spread of Christianity to the natives. People in France and New France resented the expense of the missions and doubted that the missionaries could ever turn Indians into good Christians. Kateri Tekakwitha refuted their objections.

Richter asks us to face east to try to understand the mythic needs of the Native women who joined Kateri Tekakwitha

in strenuous ascetic piety and of the later generations of Native American Catholics who have joined Euro-Americans in their belief in her powers. Can we search beneath the myth to recover any glimpses of her personality, of the contradictions or paradoxes she may have struggled with as she embraced an alien faith?⁴

We can't really know her feelings since she left no written words; she couldn't read nor write Mohawk or French. Very few of her words were recorded by Cholenec,

"I have no other spouse but Jesus Christ" and finally "Jesu, Wari (Jesus, Mary)" as she lay dying on Wendnesday of Easter week in 1680. ⁵

How did Tekakwitha, and other Native Americans, connect the cultural gap that existed between the European concept of

doctrine, a set of specific concepts to which all believers are expected to agree which was as foreign to eastern North America as the literate culture in which its sacred texts were embedded" and the Native American "beliefs which were highly diverse and involved a wide array of spiritually powerful beings with which people dealt as they went about their lives. The Iroquian orenda and the Algonquian manitou were used to describe an impersonal force that overshadowed the world; deceased ancestors, animals, trees, wind, water were all spirits with whom one must keep a good relationship because they controlled this force, this power. Shamans were granted power from these spirits based on their knowledge and effectiveness of ceremonies necessary to keeps this relationship with the spirits - "other-than-human persons".⁶

Richter points out that the Native religion was inclusivist, always ready

to incorporte new ideas and ceremonies, and generally tolerant of differences of opinion, as long as those differences did not result in perceived harm to the people...All of this was profoundly alien to the worldview of the 17th century European Christians. Whether Catholic or Protestant, all Christians were exclusivists - insistent on a single religious Truth as revealed in the Bible and interpreted by educated, ordained priests or ministers.⁷

For the Christian, religion was a set of dogmatic principles handed down to man through the Ten Commandments, the Apostle's Creed, Catechism and the Bible. For the Native American, religion was a committment to mother earth and nature surrounding life in relationships with the family and people. Would the Native American understand a "shepherd caring for his sheep", or the "kingdom of heaven", or "divine grace" to wipe away sins? For them the "in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" could not be translated in Iroquian grammar. The Eastern American would grasp that concept not as dogma as the Catholic and Christian communities had accepted, but as a relationship "our Father, his Son, and their Holy Spirit", which was fundamental to the Indian religion and way of life.

The same inclusiveness that was so alien to missionaries made it perfectly possible for Native Americans to incorporate elements of Christianity into their spiritual world ... Roman Catholic priests, with their celibacy and crossdressing in long black robes, their prayers and rituals, and their ability to manipulate potent forces, were shamans not to be taken lightly, lest they turn those forces against those who stood in their way. ⁸

The French Roman Catholic priests had a definite advantage over the English and Dutch Protestant missionairies because processions, chants, incense, bells and Mass ceremonies were all part of the Catholic piety and were familiar to the Native people as acceptable religious behavior. The French missionairies also assimilated the two cultures and religions - native and French.

There is a movie "Faith in the Wilderness" in which a family is captured by a band of Indians. As the band and its captives are escaping, from the ensuing military, towards Canada in December, the mother begins to explain the story of the birth of Jesus. The father interprets this story from the Indian viewpoint: three chiefs from neighboring tribes, gifts of bow and arrow, white horse appears to the young brave Joseph to explain to him to accept his bride Mary despite her being with child, not his; the setting takes place in an Indian village with wigwams. The man was able to "face east" in his interpretation of the Christmas story and used images familar to the Indian for him to understand and accept this story.

The Jesuits were well prepared for this missionary work. They were teachers and most were linguists. They were quick to learn the language and culture of those Natives whose conversion to Christianity was sought after. They entered Tekakwitha's country, as shamans and diplomats and from a position of great strength. The mid-seventeeth-century eastern North America experienced invasions and epidemics, which lead chiefs, headmen and military leaders to be more concerned with Indian than with European foes; they looked for new trading partners, new sources of firearms, and new alliances to reinvigorate the community's spiritual and temporal power.

Because of the successful military campaigns waged by the Iroquois against their neighbors, the war captives made up an extraordinary proportion of those who lived in their villages. Tekakwitha's mother was an Algonquin prisoner who married a native Mohawk.

In a matrilineal society, the girl's kinship ties therefore were already weak before smallpox killed both of her parents and cast her adrift ... The writings of Cholenec and Chauchetière ... are vague about the identify of her uncle with whom Tekakwitha went to live. Perhaps he was her father's brother; more likely he was the headman of the lineage into which her mother had been adopted. In either case, the young woman probably lacked the kind of kinship ties that might have rooted her in the community and have made up for the visual handicap that made her an economic liability to those with whom she lived. ⁹

One can easily understand how a young Indian maiden, trapped in such a surrounding, would find an attraction to the preaching of the French missionairies. When that person now

named Kateri left the Mohawk country to resettle at Kahnawaké, she found there the kinship, the social acceptance, and the spiritual power she had never before had, under the tutelage of priests who supported her efforts and held her up as a model of piety ... "Praying towns" were among the places in which Native Americans were reinventing themselves. ¹⁰

As James Wilson points out, the Native American life had been drastically changed by the colonists, especially the English and Dutch. This way of life in commune with nature was disrupted by the Europeans who thought they saw an unorganized people who did not know how to make use of this pristine land. Many Native Americans were relocating themselves, mainly to New France, because their former lives became intolerable after contact with the white man. They used Christianity to improve their lives in an unfriendly world. They came to believe in and accept the doctrines and practices of Christianity, but they did not abandon the basic elements of the cultures in which they were born. The people of Kahnawaké were called ongwe honwe ehatiisontha, "real men who make the sign of the cross".

I firmly believe that Kateri Tekakwitha was also predisposed to Christianity because of her Algonquin ancestry; her mother was a Catholic Algonquin from the Pachirini tribe, at Trois-Rivières in Québec, whose members had been baptized into the Catholic religion by the Jesuits. The Algonquins were a people who had adapted both native and French cultures into a new Canadian culture. The French and the Algonquins were family and tribe oriented which led to this new way of life. Two of my ancestors, Pierre Couc and his wife Marie Mite8ameg8k8e, were part of this new Canadian culture: a French-Algonquin family, whose children continued this assimilation.

Richter points out finally that the

inner life of Kateri Tekakwitha may be beyond our capacity to recover, but the forces that converged on her and on others who converted to Christianity in the 17th century are not.¹¹

I started my summary of Daniel Richter's chapter by quoting his final paragraph: Tekakwitha

symbolizes one of the many ways in which Native Americans tried to come to grips with the challenges of the seventeeth century by incorporating people, things, and ideas from Europe into a world still of their own making.

I attempted to point out to the reader ideas and concepts found in this book to justify his final statement. I have also included some thoughts gleamed from the other two writers mentioned at the beginning of this article and some of my own observations, discovered through my work in genealogy. I leave it up to you, the reader, to conclude if this author did indeed justify his final statement.

I am hoping that my article this month will assist you to fully understand who Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha was and how she adapted her life - both religious and temporal - during the colonization of, or from a facing east viewpoint, the destruction of Native America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

I will conclude with a quote attributed to Francis Parkman, a 19th century historian: "Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him." Perhaps now, the reader can understand why Tekakwitha, born a Mohawk-Algonquin, baptized as Kateri and eventually named Blessed by the Pope, incorporated Christianity to improve her religious life, seeded in her by her Christian Algonquin mother during the first four years of her life and how she allowed the French Jesuits to embrace and cherish her in her temporal life as well.

Norm Léveillée
July 2003

"Excerpts reprinted by permission of the publisher from FACING EAST FROM INDIAN COUNTRY: A NATIVE HISTORY OF EARLY AMERICA by Daniel K. Richter, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College". ¹²

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References
(1) Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha Web Site at    www.kateritekakwitha.org/kateri/.
(2) Bibliography at www.kateritekakwitha.org/kateri/
(3) Facing East from Indian Country - A Native History of Early America, Daniel K. Richter, Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 90.
(4) Ibid., p.81.
(5) Catherine Tekakwitha, Pierre Cholenec, S.J., translated by William Lonc, S.J., pp. 50 & 65.
(6) Facing East from Indian Country, p. 83.
(7) Ibid., pp. 84-85.
(8) Ibid., p. 85.
(9) Ibid, pp. 88-89.
(10) Ibid., p. 89.
(11) Ibid., p. 91.
(12) For the above references #3-4 & 6-11, permission to be reprinted here has been given from Harvard University Press, in a letter dated 30 May 2003, HUP Ref. #:031395, sent by Scarlett R. Huffman, Copyright and Permissions, and on file with the author of this article.
(13) Vine Deloria, Jr., "Custer Died For Your Sins: an Indian Manifesto", University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.
(14) James Wilson, "The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America", Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998.

Késsinnimek - Roots - Racines
Copyright © 2003 Norm Léveillée
Created 1 Feb 2003