St. Kateri Tekakwitha

St. Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 at Ossernenon, a Mohawk village in what is now upstate New York, the daughter of a Mohawk chief and a Christian Algonquin mother. A smallpox epidemic in childhood killed her parents and left her face scarred and her eyesight weak — her name Tekakwitha is often rendered 'she who bumps into things.' She encountered the Catholic faith through Jesuit missionaries and, drawn to Christ, was baptized at the age of twenty, taking the name Kateri (Catherine).

Her conversion brought hostility and ridicule from her own people, and she fled some two hundred miles on foot to a Christian Mohawk settlement at Kahnawake, near Montreal. There she lived a life of prayer, penance, and consecrated virginity, devoted to the Eucharist and the Cross, until her death on 17 April 1680 at the age of twenty-four; witnesses reported that her smallpox scars vanished shortly after she died. Known as the 'Lily of the Mohawks,' she was canonized in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI as the first Native American saint.